The Sheep Pig

Our next text is The Sheep Pig, written by Dick King Smith. The children are very excited to start it!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Next term, our book focus will be on the Shakespeare novel, A Midsummer Night's dream! The children will also be reading the book alongside their writing so that they can be fully immersed in the text. 

We will start with character descriptions and portraits of our favourites, watch this space to see how we go!

Today we finally finished publishing our stories after two weeks hard work practising all the necessary skills needed to make a good story. After some careful planning and a couple of hours of publishing we achieve great results and our very own versions of the Shakespeare scene in story form!

Over the next few days we will be taking a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream and using it to create a story. To start with, we summarised the scene into a beginning middle and end and most recently have planned what we will write in our setting description to set the scene in our story. 

Today we have been using adjectives and similes to describe characters from the book! We have also been creating character webs to identify relationships between characters.

The Tin Forest

We are also studying the text for our writing! Over the course of the last week we have been recapping key skills and using the images from the book to consolidate our knowledge. Following the old man in the story, the children have been embedding their use of descriptive language, conjunctions and tenses. 

Leon and the Place Between

Over lockdown, on seesaw, we have been reading extracts from the story and answering questions and producing writing based on themes in the book. We will continue to do so now we are back at school so watch this space!

The Story of Tutankhamun

Our Topic this term is all about Ancient Egypt and so in our Reading and Writing lessons, we will be reading the book by Patricia Cleveland-Peck and illustrated by Isabel Greenberg.

The Polar Express 

In our writing lessons we have been studying the features of the text and what makes a good story. Today we made a text map of the ending which we will use to write up our own endings tomorrow. 

Our new class text is the Polar Express written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1985. It follows the story of a young boy and his journey around the North Pole. You can listen to it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELy_4fH_h0E

Black Dog

Our new book is called 'Black Dog' written by Levi Pinfold, you can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad3a3v1cXfc

The children have been really engaged with the story and today acted out a part of the book. We had one child pretend to be Mr Hope, whilst the rest of us were the police asking him questions about the mysterious dog!

The Iron Man 

To compliment our learning within our reading sessions we are also studying The Iron Man in our writing lessons too. Looking at how the author, Ted Hughes, describes his characters, we have embarked on a mission to find as much creative vocabulary as we can to describe the Iron Man ourselves! 

Henry's Freedom Box

As well as our reading we have also been using the text to write our own diary entries. Henry was a slave, his wife and children were sold and so he vowed to escape and eventually ended up in Washington DC. Our diary entries discuss his journey. Aren't they brilliant!? 

Windrush Child 

For poetry week, we have been lucky enough to explore the poem 'Windrush Child' by John Agard. You can listen to him here: 

https://vimeo.com/34658318

We investigated the history of the poem and why it was written, as well as the language use and how we could develop it. We took a selection of imagery from the poem and generated similes and metaphors that we could use within our own writing. We decided to publish our work and create water colour washes for our poems to be published on. Check out our photos below! 

The BFG is back!

Alongside our reading lessons we have also been using the book for our writing. Using pictures, we have begun to develop our vocabulary so that we can describe the BFG and Sophie. We then built this up to show what they were doing and how they were doing it. We finished our writing unit on the story by retelling it and publishing our versions in our extended writing books. Well done Year 3!