This semester the literacy focus for Year 2 is the development of effective reading strategies and narrative writing.
Our classes have had a great deal of fun working on a narrative writing unit called Talk for Writing. Our unit of work is based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which is used as a model text for guided and independent writing.
First the children learned the story, retelling and acting it out as a chorus with gestures until they knew the language of the narrative by heart. To assist with comprehension, they drew scenes, making puppets as well as wax models of the characters. Through these activities they internalised the structure and language features of the story and built a deeper understanding about the meaning of the text. Performing drama along with making the puppets and wax models, aligns beautifully with the Steiner ideal of working with their head, heart and hands.
Short burst writing is an activity that helps the children modify the text, while keeping the structure and language of good writing. This week, Year 2 adapted this sentence of three, ‘Greedily, he licked his lips, pawed the ground and ran off to Grandma’s house.’ Students focussed on verbs and adverbs in the sentence. Then swapped out the words for their own verbs and adverbs and learned how to create their own sentence of three. They then used this sentence to create a wanted poster. Of course, the funnier or sillier the sentence, the more effective the learning process.
