Enriching Experiences

English Outside the Classroom: Observational Walk

We have been exploring the picture book 'Mirror'. It describes the lives of two boys; one lives in Australia and one in Morocco. There are many things about the boys' lives which are different; the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the environment they live in. Interestingly, there are also many similarities across their cultures; their families, their routines and their interests.

This week, we took a trip to our local shop, to compare the environment we live in to the lives of the 2 boys. Whilst we take this sort of trip all the time, rarely do we stop to observe what is going on around us. We encountered bin men, postmen, shop workers and neighbours chatting in the street. We smelt the fresh bread from the bakery and observed a crow with jet black feathers sitting on top of the traffic lights. We heard sirens blaring, music chiming and children crying.

"I really enjoyed using all of my senses to describe my journey to the shop. It is something we do all the time but you never concentrate on the small things that you can easily miss if you're not paying attention. This will help me when I'm writing my diary entry because I can use what I heard in my writing." Jacob C

'World Book Day' Celebrations: The Power of Words!

To continue Year 3's exploration of the completely wordless picture book 'Mirror', pupils were challenged to use poetry to bring the main character's emotions to life.

Year 3 wrote a Haiku poem from the perspective of one of the main characters. Once we had written our poems, we matched them together to compare what the characters had in common and what was different about their lives.

"It was really fun when we matched up our poems with our partners so that we could compare the things that were the same and the things that were different. It made me think that even though the characters live far apart, some things in their lives are the same. This impacted upon my writing because I had to write a diary about the life of the characters in the story and I had to really think hard to reduce their feelings for the Haiku." Mollie M

Trips to Inspire Writing

We visited the World Museum and The Reader at Calderstones Park exhibit in the World Museum to help us with our writing.  We learnt new facts, explored the artefacts and immersed ourselves in the life of the Stone Age to inspire our writing.

"I learnt lots of facts about The Stone Age in the museum and I can now add these golden nuggets to my writing. I also know how the artefacts look up close so this will help me when I'm describing them! " Connie B

We Are Writers!

In the lead up to our World Book Day Celebrations, every child in the school writes their own poem about a topic of their choice. The pupils choose their own style of poem and a topic of their choosing: sci-fi, adventure, mystery, fantasy: the list goes on... and compose their own unique poem.  After polishing and a few tweaks, these poems are collated and published into a school book, which each child receives on World Book Day.

You can find our books in our school library as well as our local one too: Spellow Library.  At Spellow Library, we are the featured authors on display and have performed our stories for the local community to celebrate our fantastic writing.

"We Are Writers! has been my favourite topic so far because we got to choose to write about whatever we wanted! I brought my book home and showed all my family the poems and stories from our school. I am really proud of this and can't wait for next year because I might write a sequel." Evie M