Narrative writing and stories

This term we’ve had a huge focus on learning about narrative writing. We’ve planned and written our own narratives as well as discussing the narrative structure of the books we’re reading from our good fit book boxes and classroom library.

A narrative has:

An introduction – the story starts setting the scene by describing the setting  and time of the story and introduces the characters and we get some idea of the problem that is going to happen later as the story develops.

Series of events:

Problem/ Complication– this happens around the setting and the characters involved – it can be a problem or conflict that happens to the characters.

Resolution- a solution is found to solve the problem.

We’ve written lots of different narrative stories and we’re in the process of publishing them on iPads, iPods or on the laptops.

Then we investigated stories we read. Each student was given a book with a narrative chart – we needed to identify the settings, main characters, solution and resolution for each. Some stories were quite challenging!! It was lots of fun to see how authors write their stories and relate the plans to how we’ve been writing.

Here’s some of the books and charts we created:

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Dr Seuss Activity Mornings

On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week Miss Sporn worked with the other teachers to have a Dr Seuss activity morning. Each class focussed on one Dr Seuss book and had an activity that involved the characters and story.

On Tuesday we had 2 activities and then we finished the next 2 activities on Thursday. We had a lot of fun doing each activity.

Mrs Prideux/ Mrs Chick  read Yertle the Turtle and made turtles with patterned hexagons on their shells.

Miss Humphries  read Fox in Socks and everyone made hand puppets with jokes/ riddles on the back.

Mrs Perejma read The Cat in the Hat and did a mixture of activities like writing, an interactive whiteboard balancing task and paired reading.

Miss Sporn read Horton Hears a Who and we all made huge Hortons!!!

We’ve all displayed our Hortons, Fox puppets and Yertle the Turtles in our classrooms – pop in to our rooms and see our great displays.

Here’s some photos of our sessions:

 

The Water Cycle

Our class has begun investigating water:

  • the uses of water
  • sources of water
  • the world’s access to clean water – not everyone has access to clean water everyday
  • ways of making water safe to drink
  • the effects of not having access to clean water

This week we have looked at the water cycle and used a YouTube clip to explain it to us. We’ve also made it rain in our classroom!!

The children have also planned some experiments to test how quickly water evaporates – stay tuned for our results!

Here’s the YouTube clip – we just can’t stip singing it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswL4dIDQuk

Can you tell us what you’ve learned about the water cycle?

 

Narrative Stories – Brown Bag Activity

Our class has had a very busy term developing our narrative writing skills.

We have had a strong focus on:

  • the structure of a narrative story – introduction, problem and resolution
  • how to use paragraphs in our writing
  • how to write an interesting and entertaining story
  • different adjectives to make our stories more interesting
  • using words from our Daily 5 reading activities to expand our vocabulary and then use these new words in our writing
  • editing our writing – correcting any misspelt words, adding capital letters if needed, adding fullstops, commas or speech marks

We have written a variety of narrative stories and shared them with our classmates.

THEN we chose to look at the different narrative stories we read everyday during our Daily 5 reading tasks.

Each student was given a picture fiction book (they were meant to be hidden in a brown paper bag but some were too big to fit in them) and an activity sheet to complete.

The children needed to find out the title, author, setting, characters and problem/ resolution for each book.

We had a great time reading different narrative stories and working out all the different parts of the stories.

Here are our books

Narrative Books on PhotoPeach

Can you recommend any interesting narrative stories we might enjoy reading?

Harmony Day

Last Friday our school joined in Harmony Day celebrations. As a part of Harmony Day our school wore orange clothes (the colour that represents harmony) and each class did a variety of activities to remember the day. Mr Warncken and the SLEG students hosted a whole school assembly.

From the Harmony Day website:

“Harmony Day 21 March is a day of cultural respect for everyone who calls Australia home – from the traditional owners of this land to those who have come from many countries around the world. By participating in Harmony Day activities, we can learn and understand how all Australians from diverse backgrounds equally belong to this nation and enrich it.”

Here are some photos of our day:

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Wacky Wednesday

Today our school had Wacky Wednesday. We have been reading lots of different Dr Seuss books as a lead up to our whole school production called Seussical the Musical.

We had read and LOVED  Wacky Wednesday by Dr Seuss. So we decided to have a Wacky Wednesday dress up day. It was really easy to dress up in a wacky way – odd socks, clothes on inside out, tops on back to front, a weird hat or wig…….. and the list goes on!

Here are photos from our Wacky Wednesday!

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Big Buddies

Last Friday we had our first meeting with our Year 6/7 buddy class. Miss Hollitt’s class are our buddies for 2014.

We can’t believe it’s taken until week 7 for our first meeting!! Today we found a big buddy (who we’ll work with for the whole year) and did some reading together. We got to read lots of Dr Seuss books as our class has so many of the Dr Seuss books. Next term our school is performing Seussical the Musical.

Here are some photos from last Friday’s reading session-

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Dr Suess

The Reception – Year 3 classes have been studying all the different Dr Seuss books.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on 2nd March 1904 (It was his birthday last Sunday). He was an American writer, poet and cartoonist, well known for the many books for kids that he wrote under his pen name of Dr Seuss.

All of our classes have been collecting books from home and we are all busy reading these every day. We’re also having activity mornings, doing craft activities, book reviews and anyalysing the stories through many different classroom activities.

We’ve loved reading the stories – even though they feel like we’re reading books full of tongue twisters!!! We love all the different rhyming words and nonsense words that we’ve been learning.

We’ve got a Wacky Wednesday Dress Up Day coming up on the 19th of March.

All of the students can dress up in a Wacky outfit for the day – the costumes don’t need to be anything fancy or expensive. Students should be using their imagination and creativity to come up with something crazy to wear, eg.       odd socks / long, stripy socks, bright colours, ties/bow ties, tutus, fairy wings, wigs, capes, hats   . . . anything crazy that you can create!

Here’s some photos of the display outside our classroom and our Daily 5

 

Dr Seuss reading sessions-

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What do you think you’ll wear for the Wacky Wednesday dress up day?

Monarch butterflies

Our class has been very lucky to have had 2 caterpillars in  an enclosure that have turned into Monarch butterflies.

Sriya, one of our Year 3 girls, brought 2 caterpillars in and we fed them milkweed for 1-2 weeks. Then we watched as the caterpillars turned bright green and started to spin a cocoon around their own bodies. They stayed in their cocoons for a few days, the cocoons turned black and then the Monarch butterflies hatched out.

Our class released the butterflies into the wild once they’d hatched.

We loved watching each part of the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly.

Monarch butterflies on PhotoPeach

 

Screen Shot 2014-03-06 at 8.44.37 pmWhat other life cycles could you tell us about?