This half term in Year 4, we have been reading the excellent novel of ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ by C.S.Lewis. This fantasy story explores magical themes through when a child finds a fantasy world in the back of an old wardrobe and meets various characters along the way.
Our focus over the last week has been recapping how to understand what is needed when writing direct speech. This is an important tool when writing narratives to help our reader understand what is going on. We broke down example sentences to look at the vocabulary and punctuation needed to make sure that when we are writing direct speech, we are doing it correctly. We found that we need to have an opening speech mark to show where the direct speech starts and one at the end to show when someone has finished talking and we had to write a reporting clause to match what was being said.
Our big writing task this week was to write up a conversation between Aslan and Edmund at the point of the story where the two characters finally meet. There had been lots of drama before this and we recapped the events before we started writing. C.S.Lewis actually didn’t write the conversation in the novel so we had to imagine what might have been said using reasoning from the text.
Firstly, we undertook some roleplay with our learning partners to become Aslan and Edmund and have the conversation that we think would have taken place. We tried to practice different tones when speaking to show emotions and feelings when talking to someone. We had to keep the conversation going for 2 minutes before swapping over to change characters.
Lastly this week, it was time for our big write in which we wrote up the conversation between Aslan and Edmund. Before we started, we spoke about the different reporting clauses that we could write to help aid the flow of our writing so that we weren’t also using the word ‘said’. We came up with words such as gasped, questioned, declared, insisted and demanded. We then once finished started to edit our writing to make sure we had not forgotten anything.
Year 4, your work in English this half term has been wonderful. What has you enjoyed most and would you recommend this book to anyone? Why?
