How to: Write Instructions!

This week in Year 2, we have been learning all about instructions.

We started this by looking at the age-old favourite, a jam sandwich! Our teacher tasked us to tell her how to make a jam sandwich. We quickly realised that she would do exactly what we told her to do which made our jam sandwich slightly less appealing than we had hoped for. We started to work together to be specific with our instructions and we knew that we had to be very clear with what we wanted her to do, and we had to consider which order of our instructions made the most sense! We were finally able to make the perfect jam sandwiches through clear and direct instructions. We even got to have a little try of our creations!

From here, we learnt about imperative (or bossy) verbs, like cut, slice, spread and put. We already know that verbs are doing words, but an imperative verb tells you what to do. We thought about Little Miss Bossy when we spoke about these verbs and we were able to write our own set of instructions for how to make a jam sandwich, and then went back through our work to identify our own bossy verbs! We also realised that instructions have time adverbs, along with numbers to make it clear to the reader what it is that they have to do and when. Some of our favourite time adverbs are first, secondly, thirdly and finally!

Later this week, we looked a little closer at an example of a set of instructions and these were how to look after a pet cat. We discussed all of the different features of these, such as the title, introduction, subheadings and then our bossy verbs and time adverbs. We were familiar with titles, subheadings and introductions from when we did our very own tourist guides for landmarks in London so we were experts at spotting these!

We used this example to begin to plan our very own set of instructions for our superhero, Traction Man. We were tasked to write a set of instructions for him, all about how to look after his pet Scrubbing Brush. This is his trusty sidekick that he meets during his adventure of the Wreck of the Lost Sieve. We had a think about the things that Traction Man might need in order to properly look after Scrubbing Brush, linking back to our learning in science about the things that living things need to survive, such as food, water and shelter. We spent some time planning our instructions and then wrote them independently, using all of our knowledge of instructions. We’ve been learning about the purpose of an introduction and lots of us were able to write an introduction that would be perfect for our purpose.

Well done for your brilliant work, Year 2!