So far this Year in Year 2 we have been learning all about Africa. However the letter we originally received from a young African girl names Amani asked us to also find out all about our local environment to compare the similarities and differences. At the end of our topic (week 7) we will be writing a reponse to Amani showing her everything that we have discovered.
What goes on in the classroom?
During our literacy focussed time we are focusing on building the children’s self esteem as writers. We are not focussing on spellings at this point but on getting the children writing through building vocabulary and learning how to ‘sound the words out’ before writing them down. There are some exceptions to the ‘we are not focussing on spellings’ - key word we have learnt in phonics or a topic word which is readily available on the walls.
We have been teaching the use of connectives (joining words) and, so that, but, because, to and using time words for recount writing – first, next, then, after that, finally. The children have been applying this to their language, picking cards up with pictures of African animals on saying a sentence about them using the connectives. This is then applied in their writing; the children say their sentence/idea out loud before writing it down so that they can apply the use of a connective.
Earlier in the term we spent time building vocabulary banks of description, put images on the board and describing them. E.g. a lion, around the children would write a variety of descriptions. We have furthered this “description hunting” through some of the books we have read to and with the children including ‘Tigress’ by Nick Dawson which features lots of beautiful descriptive language.
All of the children have then applied this descriptive language to a variety of sentences, check out the examples below.
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