We have started learning about recounts in English and have learnt about what the purpose of these are. Year 2 children have learnt more about the features of a recount, whilst Year 1 children have focused on sequencing. We have been applying our prior learning on adjectives to think about the detail that needs to be included in a recount in order to inform the reader. We will be using all of our learning to write our own recounts soon! 

This week, we have continued to learn about recounts by discussing their features and then finding examples of these features within existing recounts. Children in Year 2 were text-marking and this is a new skill. They did super well! We also completed a piece of creative writing to give us the opportunity to show what we have learnt so far this year and how much progress we have made. We are all working really hard 

For our final week focusing on recounts, we worked in groups to perform our own recounts to the rest of the class. Each group retold an event that had already happened by acting it out and narrating. This allowed us to practise creating sentences in the past tense orally and we then applied this learning to our Gold Writes. These are fantastic and the children are making great progress in terms of their handwriting and use of the line guide too. Year 2 children are applying what they have learnt in their grammar lessons as well and Year 1 children are working hard to use their phonic knowledge to sound out words when writing. 

We have also been carrying out some guided reading sessions in order to improve reading fluency and comprehension. Please remember that it is so important for children to be reading at home with a grown up so that they are able to practise identifying sounds, segmenting and blending, understanding what has been read and answering questions on this. If you need any support with reading at home, please let me know as soon as possible. 

This week, we have moved on to our key text 'Coming to England' and in our first lesson, we predicted what the book might be about. We talked about how important it is to use words such as 'because' in order to explain our predictions. Why do we think that? Have we used the pictures or the title to help us? Have we got prior knowledge of the text already? We then read the text through and learnt more about Floella and her family's journey to England. We thought carefully about how people might be feeling at different parts of the story and had a good discussion about moving to a new place and not feeling welcome. Following this, we completed some sequencing work where we had a part of the text which we had to read independently, before writing what happened next. As always, we have also been doing plenty of group and individual reading this week and the children are making excellent progress! Keep up the hard work.