Gold flip books
Creating text that others want to read and recording our experiences in new and interesting ways have been part of our writing focus over this term. Often writing is kept in books and rarely shared, we wanted to change that.
Creating small, quick books has been a way that we can showcase all of our growing talents from writing to illustrating and for some of us, even graphic design. The placement of text and pictures has made from some in depth discussion around what is enticing to read and what feeling or mood was being created.
Creating small, quick books has been a way that we can showcase all of our growing talents from writing to illustrating and for some of us, even graphic design. The placement of text and pictures has made from some in depth discussion around what is enticing to read and what feeling or mood was being created.
 | When we arrived back from our trip to Oceania Gold in Waihi we had these amazing learning tags that were created to act as prompts, reminding us what gold and silver are used for. We used these as plans for our writing, talking about them and remembering all of facts. The first step was to draft our ideas. What we noticed as we created our drafts was that we were using different words to start our sentences. Why was this happening? We had a great chat about words and which words were used for different types of writing. We agreed that this writing wasn't about us which was why we weren't using I and me. |
| Displaying our writing as flip books allowed us to create short pieces of writing and focus on adding detail and recording facts about one thing without getting mixed up by trying to talk about 4 things at once. For our junior writers this gave a manageable target and we made sure that we used capital letters and full stops and talked a lot about what makes a sentence. For our more senior writers this was a great step in helping to organise their writing into paragraphs, giving 3 facts about one idea or explaining one idea further. |  |
We are learning to publish our work using Pages on the iPad or Printshop on our Apple Macs. Choosing a font and a font size that would make our writing easy to read was one of our goals.
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Being prepared for writing involves lots of processes and parts of the brain all working together. Cutting skills help to develop hand eye coordination and fine motors skills, both are necessary for successful letter formation. Using stickers helps all of our writers to recognise letters in different forms and make the connection between capital and lowercase letters. Peeling them off also works on fine motor development along with helping to make our titles really colourful and interesting!
Book character interactive cards
Book Week was a brilliant excuse to put together some more books and share about our characters and the teddies that we brought for our teddy bears picnic. This work was much faster than our gold books, we only had a couple of mornings so we worked on recording short pieces of information.
Dressing up as our favourite book character was so much fun!!! These pictures show just how much effort everyone went to to really 'become' someone else for the day. But what does it mean to be a character and how can we describe them and what makes our character different to us?
| We talked a lot about our character and decided that we would explain two things. What they look like and something that they do. Our goals was to describe our character enough that our classmates could identify who it was just by reading the description. One of the frustrations that we had come across when creating books in the past was that sometimes we didn't like how everything looked together. We had the great idea of using post it notes, we had lots of fun playing with where to put our writing, pictures and labels. |  |
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| On day two we dressed in our pyjamas and brought a long a teddy for a teddy bears picnic. Mrs Smith asked us to throw all of our teddies in the air, we could have had such a jumble! We used the same idea to as we had used to describe our book characters to describe our furry friends hoping that our descriptions would help us to unmuddle the muddle. Using labels is a way to record ideas quickly and add interest in a book. It also draws the reader to the main facts without them having to read much. We experimented with labels by writing words that describe what our teddy looks like and words that describe what our teddies do. This writing started a great conversation about different types of words! We have learnt about nouns, adjectives and verbs! |  |
We have shared both of our books at assembly, if you missed them, why not come into class and have a look, we are really proud of them!
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