Simile Story challenge

What am I Story challenge!

I have two wings and a nose.
I have a tall tail.
I soar among the clouds.
I have many viewing spots, where eyes can look through to see the world below.
I fly many, many kilometres year after year to exciting destinations around the world.
What am I?


By Miss Fletcher


I have a big tail.
I love to eat fish
I soar among the sea.
I drown everyone around in fear.
I have stared in many movies, always the bad guy.
What am I?

By Braeden


I have a frame.
My frame comes in different colors.
You can see through me.
I am used for reading.
I have two arms and two big glass eyes.

What am I?

By Ronan

Instruction videos - Linking writing to real purpose

Here are some movies that the children in our class created based on what we have been focusing on in both writing and within our topic of keeping ourselves safe.  

A small group of children work with Mrs G each morning as part of a group who are learning about how writing has a real purpose in life and on strategies that help them get their ideas down.  Below are the videos they created as part of this groups focus.  They asked some other children in the class to help them make their writing into a movie as they worked out this was something they would need help with.

First they came up with their instructions (morning focus and classroom writing time).  

Next they asked buddies to help them video (or take photos) of each of these steps.  

Third they asked Mrs G to help them put it into a iMovie.  

Then they added their words.

Finally recording their words.

I'm sure you will agree these are fantastic examples of both writing and a real life application of writing for purpose.

How to wash your hands - By Bailey, Riah and Laylah

How to brush your teeth - By Sapphire, Brody, and Parani

How to cross the road - By Honey, Legacy and Sage

How to do the Floss - By Felicity, Aiden and Liam

(They even got MRS G involved - LOL)

Learning about letters and postcards

Here are some examples of writing work we have done in class around letters and postcards.  We were really lucky to have a monster write us letters that we got to write letters back to.  We also were writing letters to send to a buddy class in Stratford, and Easter bunny wasn't to far away either.  These provided us all with motivation to write letters, below are a few links to work and things we did to help us develop great letter writing skills.

This Explain everything was something we did right at the start of us learning about postcards.  We were learning where things went on a post card and the types of things we could write for both a letter and postcard.  Well done Nicole.

This is an activity we did as part of our shared book.  This helped us see how letters are great not just for writing but also for reading too.  We had great fun doing this Explain everything.  Well done Sage.

Here is an example of a letter that Stella wrote to the Easter bunny.  As you can also see we discussed what things would make our letters better as a class, and Stella was able to take her writing away and pop it into an explain everything to record what she will do next to improve her letter writing.  This was a great reflection process for all children.  Well done on your presentation Stella.

By Stella

'I can see' stories

Lately in Team Maunga we have started extending a simple sentence as part of our weekly writing.  The children are able to take this to a variety of different stages and ALL are able to succeed and challenge themselves with it.

Some children work on using the simple sentence to tell their story.  Some children add simple extensions, and others are now working towards elaborating on one idea.  

A child from our 'Accelerated Writing Group' shows how a simple I can see sentence, can be created into a magical piece of writing.  She was so excited to share this at our school assembly on Friday and is eager for this to be included on our blog.  

This is also a great example that we can use as a rewindable learning moment with the children next week as we work on our next simple sentence.  Well done Nicole.  Great stuff!

Elgregor Magic Show

This week we have been trying to use Explain Everything more to create and share our ideas for writing.  Here is an examples of how we have used it this week.  Keep watching out for more examples.

This is a recount that Stella wrote about going to the Elgregor Magic Show.  She was very motivated to write about this because she was chosen to be a helper during the show.

Stella was really excited about her work as well because she knew she had included all the elements for recount writing.  She had her Introduction, Body and Conclusion (we refer to this in class as a hamburger).  What made our class even more proud of Stella is that she did this independently and only had some support in publishing this - mainly because she initially tried publishing in Pic Collage but soon discovered that you couldn't record it.  

Great learning all around.  Well done Stella.

What am I?

This week in class we have had a shared  book called Tails and Claws.  It gives you clues about an animal and then it tells you what it is.  So in writing we have been doing something similar. 

Everyone has created some fantastic work.  The focus has been on adding adjectives to add even more detail to our work.  Some of us have moved onto publishing because they were so fantastic.  

Initially we published some for our walls.  

Then some of us decided to publish using explain everything.  When we published on explain everything we decided that we wanted to use 2 different slides.  One for our clues and one for our answer to make our work more interesting for people watching it.  When we had put all the writing in, we recorded ourselves.  The finished work is what we are most proud of.  You can see a few examples below the pictures of our initial slide set up.

Watch out for more examples coming VERY SOON!!!

Te Ika O Maui

As part of our school wide inquiry Room 5 & 6 have been looking at Myths and Legends.  This week we have been focusing on Te Ika O Maui (The Fish of Maui).

Our accelerated writing group have also been focusing on this as part of their learning.  Here is an explain everything that helped them to get their ideas sorted.  This group of children then shared this with the class to help them with their learning.  Fantastic work.

Here is an example of a year 1's writing that came from this work today.