Our Adventure Stories
 

Last week, we brought all our learning in English together to write our own adventure stories based on Kensuke’s Kingdom. We used varied sentences, tension building techniques, descriptive vocabulary and paragraphing.

We wrote the stories in our English books, editing along the way to ensure it was always our best work. We then published them in neat.

We made front covers and blurbs for the back of our published books. Here are a few examples...

A Ship’s Log

This term, each week, we have entered some of our writing in a ship’s log. We created the log books ourselves, based on the log book examples in our class reader, Kensuke’s Kingdom. We are so proud of the results!

Can my reader picture my character? Is my description clear and detailed enough?

Today we started writing our own adventure stories based on Kensuke’s Kingdom. To start our stories, we described our characters, making sure we included a great amount of detail in our description so that our partner could draw a careful image. Our partners then gave us helpful tips so that we knew what to add to our description to make it even better.

How do authors build suspense?

Today we explored how Michael Morpurgo created an atmosphere of suspense in his writing about when the character gets stung by a jellyfish. We identified that the author used short sentences, senses, partial sentences and repetition. We then had a go at describing the event  in our own words, using the same techniques. After our 15 minutes of silent writing,  each other’s work and made comments on who had achieved the success criteria we identified.

How do authors make their writing interesting to the reader?

We discussed all the ways that writers make their writing interesting to read. One of the ways is to use a variety of sentence openers so that sentences are lively, exciting and varied.

A strategy we use in school to help us to remember different types of sentence openers  is to use ISPACE words. Today we experimented with making sentences using each of these.

The Gurgling Bell

Having studied the ballad of ‘Inchcape Rock’ this week, today the children published their ballads entitled ‘TheGurgling Bell’.

They were challenged to tell the story of how the bell was discovered and what happened next ...

What is a ballad?

This week we have been reading and listening to the ballad of ‘Inchcape Rock’.  The children were introduced to the poem and asked to continue it by writing their own verses in the style of the author.

What can we predict about a story?

We were given some clues (images, photos, quotes, words) about the story and we had to link these to create a story prediction that we needed to justify and explain to each other.

Who is Michael Morpurgo?

We were each given some information about Michael and then we had 5 minute speed data sharing session in which we had to learn as many new facts about him as possible! We then recorded this information as a spider diagram.