Writing

With writing being one of your formally-assessed subjects at the end of Year 6, we have an extra-special focus on it this year, in order to help you to improve as thoroughly and rapidly as possible.

This term, the text 'Dracopedia', alongside a number of information texts about animals, will help each of us to write a realistic information text about our own species of dragon. The dragons that we make up will be believable and realistic creatures, linked to our Science topic on Evolution and Adaptation. Our Literacy and Science units complement each other really well and we are looking forward to seeing how our learning in each subject helps us in the other one!

The unit will explore some of the ways in which we can write formally, using passive verb forms, standard English, expanded verbs and technical language to create information texts that educate a reader and give them confidence that what they are reading is authoritative and true. 

Why then, are we making up a creature in order to do this? The answer is simple! Whilst we will be drawing upon the inspiration we have received from the texts we've read, we don't want to simply be re-writing something that we've already learnt about a species in the animal kingdom. Instead, we want to create information texts that are 100% our own - our ideas, our planning and our own writing!

After the half term break, we turn our attention back to Narratives, this time reading a very different text to Rooftoppers (which we read in Term 1). 'Wonder', by RJ Palacio, is a brilliant and very moving book set in the modern era, written about a boy who is born with 'cranio-facial abnormalities' (an unusual-looking face). The story tracks his life through his first year in school at the age of 10 (he has been home-schooled up to this point) and takes on different characters' viewpoints in order to develop the storyline. As well as being an interesting exercise in seeing a character through different people's eyes, the story provides us with lots of material for our main focus in the unit - the use of dialogue (speech between characters) to develop characters and further the action. As we move towards our hot write, we will plan a chapter of our own, where the protagonist (August Pullman) meets a character whom we have made up. Through their dialogue, we will reveal what this character is like, show some of their back-story, and leave the reader with an idea of what August's time in school will be like.