Past, Present, Future ... Tense that is!

 Our writing genre that we are learning about is Diary Entries also known as 1st Person Recounts.  So that we can be successful, we have learnt about verbs and verb tenses. 

We have identified verbs in the different tenses and we have sorted stories told in the different tense.

  

Today we wrote our own events in the past, present and the future. We found the present tense the hardest to write.

Shared Writing

 For the past two weeks, we have been learning about personal recounts. Firstly we read and analysed them. During this time we spent time pulling apart a variety of 1st person recounts in order to work out what the features were. We spent some time looking at the idea of past tense and those irregular past tense verbs. We also looked at different time connectives as we want to be using a variety of these in our own recounts and not just 'then.' 

Our next step was to work together to write a recount. Together we came up with the idea of a 'magical' trip to Orana 'Super' Zoo and in small groups of 3 or 4, we planned our parts. We then wrote the paragraph we were responsible for and illustrated it. In the editing phase, we read each others paragraph and analysed it against the success criteria. From this we were able to give the different groups an improvement point.

Finally we put all the parts together and here is the finished product. 

Book Creator and Te Mahuri's Incredible Speeches

 Today the children of Te Mahuri started to present their Speeches to their classmates.  It was fascinating to listen to these children speaking confidently to their classmates.  It takes a lot of confidence to stand in front of a group of people and talk to them about a subject you have chosen and poured your heart and soul into creating.

What was equally as impressive was the respect shown to the speakers by their audience.  These children truly have mastered the art of supporting their peers to give of their best, of respecting others right to be heard and offering encouragement when it was needed. Tino Pai to mahi Te Mahuri.

You can see what the Te Mahuri children have been learning about in writing by going to this page.

In Cybersmart the class have been working on using Book Creator.  They copied and pasted their text from their Workbook into the book creator project.  Then they had to record their voices reading their speeches and they videoed themselves saying their speeches.

They have linked their speeches onto their blogs...Check them out!!!

Please leave positive and helpful feedback for the children to read and enjoy.  They have worked really hard.

Nga Mihi

Sarah Dods

Wonderful Writing! What?

This week in our class some of my writing teams have been learning about iSPACE. Do you know what iSPACE is? No? Well what a minute and I'll tell you. It is going to make your writing fabulous!

iSPACE is a clever way of starting your sentences in different ways. We can use an -ing word, a simile, a preposition, an adverb, a connective or an -ed word. A-ha it really is a wonderful thing to know.

We started with looking at these two pieces of writing and thinking about which one was better and more importantly why it was better. Which one do you think is better? Why?

The part we have found challenging has been making sure we use the iSPACE words at the start of our sentences and not just in our sentence.

We've really enjoyed learning about this because we know it is going to make our writing more exciting to read. We also love the idea that we are writing complex sentences. How cool is that?!  Have a go at using iSPACE in your writing.