Year 4 have been getting into the Christmas spirit in our English lessons this week! We have enjoyed reading our new text, Coming Home, by Michael Morpurgo. Coming Home is a story all about a robin’s journey home in time for Christmas, to see his loved one.
We have been learning about the form of the text, narrative poetry, and studying the features of narrative poetry carefully before attempting to write some ourselves in our big write next week.
The class began thinking about what the word ‘home’ means to them, and the things we might see, hear, smell and feel at home.
We then considered how the dictionary definition of a home might be too limited, as we all have different experiences and interpretations of what ‘home’ means to us. The children enjoyed coming up with their own personal definitions of home and sharing these with the class, Mr. Kersys even came up with one himself!
In the next lessons Year 4 watched a recording of the author, Michael Morpurgo reading the poem. We made notes about how Morpurgo performed the narrative poem by changing his tone, expression and pace at different parts of the poem to evoke different feelings. The children experimented with this by selecting a portion of the poem to recite in front of the class. The children particularly enjoyed using object around the room to create sound effect to evoke rain, thunder and wind. They were extremely confident and altered their tone and pace wonderfully.
Finally on Thursday we began to decipher how the author uses language and poetic devices to create imagery. We learnt that imagery is a powerful technique which helps us to empathise with the characters in a text, as well as to better understand their thoughts, actions and motives:
Imagery can be evoked through powerful verbs and adjectives, personification, similes and metaphors.
Year 4 then analysed a stanza in the poem to identify these devices and then experimented with using them by adding their own stanza to the poem in our short burst writing session!
I hope you are enjoying this text as much as I am!
I can not wait to read your narrative poems next week… 🙂
Coo I got home is a very good book because it goes back and forward which I like about the story🎄