During our writing lessons, Year 5 have been using the stimulus ‘The Snowman’ by Raymond Briggs to develop our effective sentences. We have also watched the animated film to help us to visualise the different parts of the story. Each lesson we develop our ideas on our ‘Thinking Side’.

On our ‘Thinking Side’ we carefully consider each of our writing lenses. We think about ways that we can achieve these lenses on our ‘Writing Side’. In the images above you can see how Dolcie and Jackson have thought of different words to describe the snowman using alliteration. In their final learning chunk you can see how they have considered the snowman’s inner thoughts and have written them inside thought bubbles.

Once we have gathered our thoughts we write our sentences on our ‘Writing Side’. You can see how Ruben and Lola have included brackets above to add in additional information into their sentences. Their sentences are focussed on the character James building his snowman and playing in the snow.

Each lesson we focus on a different plot point from the text or film. We develop our sentences around these plot points. Below, Jackson and Dolcie are describing James ‘expertly tiptoeing’ out of his bedroom and going downstairs to meet the snowman.

Our lessons have focussed on the main plot points of the story. Then we will use the skills that we have developed to write our own alternative version of the story from the snowman’s perspective.

Once we have completed our independent writing activity, we are going to compile our sentence stacking writing into our own books, illustrate them and share them with the children in EYFS before Christmas. We look forward to sharing them with you.