Summer 1 Learning

During our topic of 'Are Eggs Alive?' we become much more confident in writing for different purposes. Most of us are now able to write an extended sentence using 'and' or 'because' and want to learn more about story writing, invitations, lists and writing letters. We decide to capture this interest by launching the topic of 'Can I be an Author?' 

We are learning to write; a story with a beginning, middle and end, to understand more about the features of stories, to write interesting sentences by adding an adjective and to use capital letters and full stops to show meaning. We are also learning to spell Phase 3 tricky words correctly. 

We share our favourite fairy tale stories and talk about the characters. We dress up as our favourite character from a book. We talk about the costumes we are wearing and what happens to the character in the story.

We have a lovely time engaging in a variety of activities linked to fairy tales and listen to lots of new stories. We talk about the question 'Can I become an Author?' and explore what an author does.  

We hold a Mad Hatter's Tea Party and enjoy yummy biscuits and 'tea' from a tea pot as we share the stories we already knew. 

The next day we find a beautiful, shiny, sparkly shoe on a glittery cushion. Who could the shoe belong to? Lots of teachers and children try it on... Then we find a magical scroll asking for help to find the owner of the shoe signed by a prince.

We decide that we want to help the prince to find the princess who the shoe fits. We look everywhere and make 'Wanted' posters to help find her. It is so much fun being detectives looking for clues. We persevere finding the owner!

We decide the character was Cinderella and enjoy listening to the Cinderella story and the events. We think that if we spotted a pumpkin or a mouse, we might find her. 

We learn the story of Cinderella using Kung Fu Punctuation and actions to help us. We help our teacher to make a story map to help us write our own Cinderella story. 

We learn the following sentence starters can help us to write the story. (You can try them at home to make any story.)

The sentence starters are:

Once upon a time there was a...

She/He lived in a...

One day...

But...

So...

Then...

Finally...

We learn how to use story language like 'Once upon a time' and 'They lived happily ever after'. 

Every day, during our themed learning, we practise writing the Cinderella story using these sentence starters and the story map we have made to help us. We say our sentence aloud, count the words in the sentence, use our phonic knowledge to sound out the words and spell some tricky words correctly. We have to make sure we have finger spaces too. Some of us use capital letters and full stops.  We write the whole story and are super proud of our writing. 

As we become more familiar with story structures and story language we enjoy making our own stories in play and writing.

The children explore stories further to help them with their own story ideas. We think of all the characters we know and can use in our own stories. We think of all the different settings and describe them. Then we learn more about events, including problems in stories and how they are solved. We use the sentence starters again to write our own stories.  

Look through the photos at the bottom of the page to see some of our amazing stories.

At the end of our topic all the Reception children can proudly say, "Yes, we can be authors!"

Now we can write a story using sentence starters to write a beginning, middle and end. We understand more about the features of stories and some of us are learning to write interesting sentences by adding an adjective. We are growing in confidence to use capital letters and full stops to show meaning. We can spell Phase 3 tricky words correctly.