Story Writing with Sunny

In Year 2, we have been studying Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett.

This is a fantastic book that follows Sunny, a meerkat, that decides to leave his family to go on different adventures. Whilst he’s away, he writes to his parents about his experiences. He tends to write about the food that he’s eaten and the weather that he’s experienced whilst in these new places. In our first few lessons about this text, we developed our inference skills as we thought carefully about how he might be feeling. We noticed in his postcards that he begins to write to his entire family, rather than just his mum and dad. Through his writing, we can really sense how he feels and we had great conversations, using the text to back up our claims. We also answered a range of retrieval questions, from finding out where Sunny and his family lived, to what he packed to take on his journey.

We looked at the description that Sunny uses and had a go at writing some short setting descriptions based on images of Antarctica, Brighton beach, Trafalgar Square and even Paddington Street Gardens! We considered the different things that we could eat there, like worms and maybe even fish and chips. We have used these descriptions to write postcards and now have them on display in our classroom. We are really proud of this work!

This week though, we have had a special guest visiting our class. You won’t believe who came… it was Sunny! We took him on an adventure around school and considered the different things that he could see, smell, hear, taste and touch around school. We gathered lots of different adjectives to describe rooms like our classroom and the hall, and also came up with some progressive verbs like drilling and chatting! We were so excited to take Sunny around school and we took great care when going up and down the stairs with him!

On Tuesday, we started to think about an exciting visit that Sunny could have at our school. We spoke about the importance of a story making sense, and the fact that we should have a beginning, middle and end. We learned that our stories must be coherent (this means that it makes sense), and one way of making sure that it does is to carefully plan it. To plan our stories, we used story maps. This is a skill that we learned in Year 1 and know that it can be a great way for us to visualise what will happen on our adventures. We knew that we were going to be writing as if we were Sunny so we would have to use ‘I’ within our writing.

We split up our story map into our beginning, where we describe the scene and the places around us, the middle, where something exciting happens, and the end. After we had completed this, we spoke through our story with our learning partner. This was our chance to add any extra detail and to check that our story map included enough detail to help us with our writing.

We came to write our stories and lots of us have been working really hard on our joined handwriting so have tried to include this within them. We all have different versions of our stories and have tried to be as creative as possible when it comes to Sunny’s (sorry, our) adventures at St Vincent’s. Some of us have written about the jackals that torment meerkats, sneaking into school and endangering us, others have written about an all-important football match which ends in triumph. We have tried really hard to make sure that our stories are interesting, through high-order vocabulary choices and have been working on proof-reading our work to check that it makes sense.

In our photos, you will see us taking Sunny on his adventure and see our writing process. In the comments, share what happened in your version of Sunny’s adventure at St Vincent’s!

We have loved our learning about Meerkat Mail and couldn’t recommend it enough! Have you read it before? Did you enjoy it as much as we did?