For the last two weeks, year two have been working really hard learning how to write explanation texts in English. An explanation text is a piece of writing that explains how to do something.
We began our unit of learning like every other English unit, with a cold task. This is when we complete a task at the beginning of the unit, that will then be compared to the end of unit hot task to measure the progress we have all made in our understanding of writing an explanation text. We were given freedom on what to write about for this and our teachers were very impressed that we retained some important knowledge from previous learning, for example time words and use of headings.
Take a look:
Then, we began learning our class text: How to be a Teacher! We all found this text particularly amusing, for example the sentence “They live in a school and survive on coffee and biscuits.” gave us the giggles. When learning the text, we focused on some key skills our teachers assessed from our cold task that we needed some support in: subordinating conjunctions, present tense verbs and using our comprehension skills.
Take a look at some of the work we have achieved so far:
Finally, we are now beginning our independent task where we will apply some key features to our own explanation texts. The new text is called “How to be a Child” and we certainly have some hilarious headings in our explanation texts, such as “How to be Mischievous” and “Why the McDonald’s and Pepsi?” (which linked to the teacher version “Why the Coffee and Biscuits?” because us teachers consume a lot of these allegedly).
Take a look at some of our plans for our hot task:
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- Class text map
Remember to check Seesaw for our recorded versions of your child’s explanation text.
How to help at home:
- Play ‘Spot the conjunction’ when reading a non-fiction text. We have been looking at subordinating conjunctions, i.e. because, when, if, that.
- What is a verb? Can your child tell you the present tense and past tense of a verb, for example: I run –> I ran.
- Dare your child to write a “How to be a Parent” explanation text. I’m sure it’ll have you both smiling from ear to ear!