Over the past few weeks, Year 1’s English lessons have been focused on ‘writing to inform’. This means that our writing shows that we are telling someone about something. Our lessons have been based on the book ‘Gruffalo Crumble and Other Recipes‘ by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.
We began by reading the story of ‘The Gruffalo’ and talked about the main characters: the Gruffalo, the mouse, the fox, the snake and the owl. The Gruffalo wanted to have a party with the woodland animals so that they can all be friends. Our first job was to write an invitation to the animals from the Gruffalo.
We then shared the purpose of our writing unit, which was to write recipes for the Gruffalo’s party. We talked about how a recipe gives someone instructions to tell them what they need to do to make a particular type of food. The first recipe we looked at was ‘Terrible Tusks’. As we were reading the recipe, we talked about what makes a good recipe – a title; pictures/illustrations to help the reader see what they need to do; labels and captions; numbered instructions; simple and clear sentences; a list of what the reader will need and a photo to show the reader what the food should look like. We also looked at the recipe for ‘Fox’s Sandwiches’.
Our final task was to go into the forest to make a delicious mud pie for a Gruffalo party! We also wrote a recipe for the mud pie and tried to make sure we included as many features of what makes a good recipe as we could.
How you can help at home:
- Help your child to find a recipe for something they enjoy eating. Look at the criteria above for what makes a good recipe. How many of the criteria can they find in the recipe?
- Encourage your child to write and follow a recipe of their own e.g. how to make a cheese sandwich. We would love to see photos of the finished products on Seesaw!