Grade 2 and the Small Knight

The focus this term has been to develop writing skills using the power of reading as a teaching tool. The power of reading is not a way to teach, just an approach. It focuses on high quality age specific children’s literature and uses every aspect of the text to form the foundations of English lessons. This is not just sitting down and writing every lesson! It requires involvement through open discussions, role play, freeze framing, hot seating and much more. We started our topic this term by looking at the front cover and simply discussing. We didn’t read the book straight away as stopping point are used in other lessons. They were also un-aware at the time how important a role the cake would play in our upcoming lessons!!!

Acting out!

This followed by reading the text and writing adjectives to describe various characters. This was all to help understand the characters feelings, characters behaviour and immerse the children within the book. Once the initial stages of this approach have been done the children are able to recall, order, recite lines and even write alternative scenes. Acting out the story followed and after such enjoyment reading the book all I really needed to do was sit back and take the pictures for the role play lesson. The children were each given various scenes from the story to practice and whilst narrating the acting, expressions and ideas were all their own. After many lessons of reading the story the time came to reveal we were going to be making a chocolate cake. The children were set a task before this could be done though!!!

Making a Chocolate Cake!

The children had to write the ingredients, think about how to actually make the cake and to write out the instructions. On the day they would all be responsible for how their group’s cake turned out. The learning that took place prior to this was incredible. The children, (hopefully still) would be able to recall the main stages of making a chocolate cake. Unfortunately we couldn’t make cakes every day much to their disappointment and IGA’S cake isle sales so since we have been back at out desks learning about the meaning of empathy, freeze framing and preparing to re-enact a famous Battle. Really engaging in a text that is linked to the topic provides children with such a great foundation of understanding and brings more purpose to their writing. This can be seen through the questions they ask, the writing they produce and….the smiles on their faces.

Goodbye from Grade 2!