Shooting Stars!

It has been a while since we had new work on our Shooting Stars wall. This is where we share good examples of things we are ALL trying to learn. Children's own work is often the best 'teacher' for other children learning the same skill!

We have 2 writing super stars here:

Samantha has shown us a great example of a 'complex' sentence.

Complex sentences are tricky to explain to 7 and 8 year olds! With Samantha's example, we could see a sentence with another idea 'tucked' inside it. Samantha is learning to use commas to make this extra little idea stand separately. Here is her sentence with the special part highlighted:

Once upon a time in Magic World Jenny Jackhound, the half jack rabbit and half hound, was using her magic reading powers!

You know you are doing it right if you can take out the highlighted part and the sentence still makes sense! Very tricky...

Jonathan showed us how changing the length of your sentences makes your writing more interesting to read.

If all our sentences are short, our story will sound 'choppy'. If all our sentences are long, it might just put us to sleep! We need a mixture of both types of sentences to make our story enjoyable to read. Here is part of Jonathan's story about hacradeens (apparently this is a new sea creature that has been discovered!) with the short sentences highlighted:

Hey! Have you ever heard about a hacradeen? Today I'm going to talk about them. When they are angry their eyes light up red. Red is my favourite colour. Hacradeens can play skeleton too. Get it? Sometimes they light up as a skeleton!