Today 3A visited one of the prep grades to share our recently published picture story books. We had been looking forward to doing this! The books were written with a younger audience in mind and we think that the preps really enjoyed listening to our stories and seeing the pictures that matched the words.
What did you enjoy about sharing your Picture Story Book?
This week in Writer’s Workshop we are learning about the features of a picture story book
Below is a table that we developed which shows what 3A consider to be the ……..
ELEMENTS OF A GOOD PICTURE STORY BOOK
| TITLE | Memorable, catchy, match tone of story |
| THEME | (Message) emotions, difference, friendship, feelings, YCDI keys |
| CHARACTER/S | Personality, mood, |
| NARRATIVE STRUCTURE (Problem/complication) | A problem/complication that needs to be solved |
| BOLD BEGINNING | Hooks the reader |
| SETTING | Set the mood and help reader become involved with story |
| VOICE/AUDIENCE | Story appeals to the audience. Author’s personality shines through. Believable and related to author’s experience. |
| WORD PLAY(good to read aloud) | Rhythm, rhyme, repetition, voice, flow, sensory words, alliteration, vocabulary, adjectives, verbs, similes, onomatopoeia, |
| ILLUSTRATIONS | Create drama and excitement, support the text, reveal what is not said (gives reader opportunity to make inferences), create a “big reveal” moment |
| EXCELLENT ENDING | Ties up the story. |
Today we read
It made us laugh! Fearless is timid and polite but people who didn’t know him thought he was scary.
We wrote on the features of this picture story book on our whiteboard.
What did you like the most about Fearless?
Can you describe Fearless’s character traits?
When exploring information reports we decided that the following elements were really important:Planning (using a graphic organiser)
Title
Introduction (general statement/classification/description of what report is about)
Paragraphs to organize information (3 or more sentences per paragraph)
Topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph
Sentence Fluency (long and short sentences)
Conjunctions (to make some sentences longer)
Facts
Technical words
Summary ( to tie all of the information together)
Revision using ARMS – Add, Remove, Move, Substitute
Editing using CUPS – Capitals, Understanding, Punctuation, Spelling
An annotated information report about Day and Night
You will notice that the students of 3A did a great job of using the important elements listed above in their Information Reports.
What do you think is the most important element of an information report?
Focusing on interesting words is a great way to increase our vocabulary when reading, speaking and writing. We have been exploring poetry and writing down the interesting words and their definitions on leaves.
Have you found any interesting words in your Independant
Reading books or poems?
This week 3A are learning about Poetry in our Reading and Writing workshops. Here some of the videos of our strategy groups reading a poem.
This week we practiced writing Narratives within a time limit to prepare for the NAPLAN next week.
When writing Narratives we need to remember to include:
Beginning: Where (Setting), Who (Characters), When (Tense-usually the past)
Middle: Complication/problem
Ending: Resolution (problem solved)
It is also helpful to use the 6+1 Traits of Writing (conventions, organisation, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions).
What do you enjoy most about writing Narratives?
This semester Grade 3 have been learning how to write persuasive texts.
We have learnt how to structure an argument using the conventions trait.
It is important to focus on the word choice and voice traits too.
These posters help us remember some of the strategies that we can use to successfully write really persuasively!
Which strategies do you enjoy using when you write a persuasive text?
3A have done a fantastic job of writing personal narratives using the 6+1 Traits of Writing to follow the writing process from Ideas, Entries, Drafting, Revising and Editing to Publishing.
We hope you enjoy reading our personal narratives!