Years 3/4

In Writing, we have been looking at how we can make our Narrative writing more descriptive. We self-reflected on our Cold Write's by using a checklist and all noticed that we were not describing our setting in great detail. We did an activity this week on describing the setting. Here is some of our work.

One spooky day, everybody abandoned the town. It was lovely until everyone left. I bet they left because everyone started to fight. Every house, every shed, supermarket, workplace and shop had animals and cobwebs. The grass kept growing and eight trains sat there unloved. By Emma Thomas.

Down by the end of the lake was a spooky, old train station. There waiting, were heaps of old trains with cobwebs. By Nate Weilbaecher. 

One spooky day there were eight destroyed, abandoned trains and one old car. There was also a rusty shed with a mouldy house and millions and millions of dangerous animals.  By Eli Keymer-Newley.

On a spooky day in an abandoned town, the police found a skeleton, bats, ghosts and there was plenty of grass. There were nine rusted trains and nobody wanted to return. By Cooper Leese. 

Down by the old abandoned train station sat eight old rusty trains. The grass hadn't been mowed for years now. This place is unloved. By Thomas Hurley. 

An abandoned train station. It's no more. It's just full of bats and cobwebs and skeletons. Every day it sits silent and still. Some people say it was broken and others just say it is too scary. By Ava Huf. 

In Reading, we read a picture story book called 'Unknown' which was written by Colin Thompson. Unknown is a book about the unwanted dogs at the pound. Each dog has been given a name based on the reason it ended up at the pound: 'Unwanted-Christmas-Gift', 'Stray', 'Grown-Too-Large' and 'Unknown', who was left at the door in the middle of the night. All the Year 3/4 students loved this book, even though it made us feel sad. We had a big discussion about the book. We talked about:

• the pictures. All of the pictures in the book were dark and gloomy - Cooper thought the illustrator chose to draw pictures with dark colours because it is a sad book and the pictures help make us feel sad for the dogs. 
• the purpose of the book. We discussed author's purpose. There were mixed opinions about whether the purpose was to entertain, persuade or both. While this book did entertain us, many students felt the messages behind the book were persuading us to adopt from the pound. 
• the structure of the story. This story followed the narrative structure which is what we have been learning about in Writing. We noticed a clear introduction where we met the characters and discovered the setting. We noticed a build up and a big problem. There was then a solution to the problem followed by a happy ending. 
• how this text relates to our own lives. In the book, the dogs were all very frightened by the storm, particularly the thunder. Ava was able to connect to this part as she said her dog Duchess also gets very scared of the thunder. 
• how this text made us feel. We all felt very sad by how some of these dogs were treated.

In Maths, Year 3/4 students have been learning about surveys and graphs. We each came up with a survey question as well as some options and asked the class for their answers. We then used tally marks to record the results. We then created a bar graph based which represent our results. Here is our work!