Over the last 3 weeks in English we have been learning to write stories. We started by learning a story called The Great Kapok Tree off by heart. We used a story map and made up our own actions to help us.

We thought it was a great story and really enjoyed listening to and telling it. We decided it was a great story because it had an exciting ‘unfortunately’ and were very pleased to see that there was a ‘luckily’ that followed! We also noticed that some of the nouns in the story had adjectives to describe them. We learnt that these are called expanded noun phrases.

the squawking birds

the howling monkeys

the smaller man 

Once we had learned The Great Kapok Tree off by heart and identified the features that made it great we then worked together in our classes to change the unfortunately, luckily and ending of the story. In Bear class we decided that there was a door in the tree that lead to a slide.

Here is our class story

This week we moved on to the independent phase of our story writing. This meant we could use our own wonderful ideas to make up our own stories. We drew our story plans and then enjoyed sharing our stories with our friends. We know that the more we practise what we want to write the easier it makes our writing so we made sure to tell our story to as many people as we could!

We worked really hard when writing our stories and we are feeling very proud of our efforts.

How to support at home 

• Use story language in every day situations e.g. unfortunately the shop had ran out of bread. Luckily they had rolls instead.
• Identify the ‘unfortunately’ and ‘luckily’ when sharing stories together.
• Help your child to hunt for interesting adjectives in reading books. Write them down so you can remember them.
• Encourage your child to write for a purpose e.g. birthday card, shopping list, note for a family member.