Literacy: writing – 20.05.20

Our writing lesson this week comes from the Scottish Book Trust. The first thing I would like you to do is watch this video of Socttish author Mairi Hedderwick talk about how she creates her stories:

https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/authors-live-on-demand/mairi-hedderwick

(Parents, the video is about 35 minutes long but there are shorter clips you could watch that are linked to on the website)

Using what Mairi Hedderwick shared in her talk, your writing task is:

Imagine you are on holiday on the Isle of Struay and you are writing a postcard home to a friend. Tell your friend what you have been doing, what the weather is like, what you have seen on the isle and whether or not you have met Katie Morag!

The first thing I did was to get a picture of the Isle of Struay in my mind. I flicked through some Katie Morag stories, looking carefully at the illustrations for ideas. If you do not have a Katie Morag book at home you could look at some of these pictures, watch a story on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1q-2g1c6HY or watch some of the TV series to help you.

Next, I drew a picture of the Isle of Struay which will be the front of my postcard. I find having a picture makes it easier to imagine myself there and gives me something to describe. Here is my postcard:

Now I am ready to start writing my postcard. I’m going to go back to the writing task to remind me of what to do. I have underlined the key words which tell me what to include in my postcard.

Here is my finished postcard:

What have I done well? What could I improve? Have I used enough WOW describing words?

My steps to success were:

Imagine myself on the Isle of Sturay – look at pictures to help Draw a picture of the isle Underline key words from writing task Write using full stops, capital letters, adjectives, openers and connectives Read over my work to check it makes sense and to check I have described all parts of the

task

In class we often talk about what tools we can use if we are struggling. Some of the tools we use to help us with writing are:

Discuss our ideas before we start writing. Record our ideas on an ipad then write while listening to our recording. (This means the

children can focus on getting their ideas out first while not worrying about all the secretarial skills of writing at the same time)

Have a word bank of words we may find tricky to spell but want to include – ask someone at home for help with this or use a dictionary. This should be the describing words you thought of to describe your monster.

Use a visual prompt to help us come up with ideas (see above). Have access to a list of common words so we can check our spelling ourselves (see below). Look at an example for ideas (see my example above).

When you are finished, take a picture or type it into a word document and then upload it to the ‘Writing for feedback’ file on Teams.