The Reading Bug by Paul Jennings

This book, by successful children's author Paul Jennings, is about what we can do as parents to help children find the right book. I just finished reading it and was really impressed with the uncomplicated language and the brilliant cartoons. Here's a review from amazon. There are some great reading lists at the back too.

Cool! Look at the visitor map! A visitor from Europe

We had a visitor from Bicester, England!  Have a look at the map which shows where our visitors are from.  I wonder what the weather is like there at the moment?  I wonder who the visitor was?

3W are great travel writers!

Our class is working on making brochures to advertise a country.

We are linking our literacy report writing topic with our weather unit in Humanities, as well as using ICT skills taught during last term.

We are using publisher to make the final product. We collected information from a number of sources, including encyclopedias, books from the library, google and our literacy lessons.

We collected information using kidspiration as a kind of scrap book. On the right is an example.

We had the following criteria for success:

Language features: the report

• is written in present tense
• is impersonal (no I or We)
• is organised into sections
• starts with an introductory section
• has sections which might include weather, attractions, food, clothes or other items you might need to bring, how to get there, things to do and see
• tries to persuade the reader
• includes some connectives which make sentences longer and more interesting
• contains headings (or titles) and subheadings (or subtitles) which are underlined, may be in larger font and maybe in bold. These are used at the beginning of paragraphs
• includes pictures (photos or diagrams) with captions to describe them

Science - burning!

We went to the science lab and learnt about flammable and inflammable things. We even tried to burn a cup of water!







The burning cheesos made a very strange smell.








Wow! The paperclip went red hot ...but did it burn?





What was left on the bottom of the glass jar when it went in the safety flame of the bunsen burner?