My War Diary (But shhh! It’s a secret)

This term, children in Year 5 have diary writing as their genre. To facilitate their learning and understanding, the book ‘My Secret War Diary’ by Marcia Williams is being used. In the book, the author assumes the identity of Flossie Albright, a girl of nine-and-a-half years of age at the outset, whose diary charts her experiences, thoughts and feelings throughout the course of World War II. Alongside this, the current novel being read to the two classes is ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ by Michelle Magorian – a story about a nine-year-old boy, Willie, who is evacuated from London during the War to live with Tom, who has lived on his own for 40 years since the death of his wife and daughter.

The primary learning outcome at the end of the topic is for every child to ‘create a diary entry from the perspective of a key character’. Along the way, each child has his or her individual target to achieve – ranging from using fronted adverbials at age-related standard to weaving together home and life events from history for those aspiring to write above the age-related standard.

‘My Secret War Diary’ has a particularly colourful and engaging appearance. Below can be seen the book cover and some pages of the text:

We have our Pen Licence

Three very proud girls today from Poplar Class received their Pen Licence. Congratulations, keep up that beautiful hand writing.

The Diggers are Coming

In Reception we have started our new topic about transport. The book we are studying is called The Diggers are Coming by Susan Steggall. We have added actions to the story and learnt to name lots of vehicles. We have discovered what each vehicle does and used this information to make our own stories.

Fairy Tales in Year 3!

This week in Year 3 we have finished our English unit on Fairy Tales.

We have looked at lots of fairy tales and learnt them off by heart, performed them, written about them, dissected them and thought a lot about their structure.

For our final piece, we were inspired by the illustrations you commonly see with fairy tales and we used this to watercolour the bordered edge of our big writes – we wrote an alternative ending to the traditional story of Snow White for our final pieces. We worked extremely hard and the Big Writes show that off!