Learning About Writing

Making Our Writing More Interesting

This term our class has been learning ways to make our writing more interesting.

We have learnt many different ways but first I’m going to explain direct speech. Direct speech is recording exactly what someone said such as: “Hello Megan,” Mrs Bryant said to me when I entered the class in the morning.

Direct speech needs five different things: speech marks at the top of the beginning and the end of what the person has said, a capital letter for the first thing that they’ve said, the name of the person who said the thing you have written, a capital for their name and a powerful verb that describes how they said it.

Another thing we have been learning about is onomatopoeia. I already know what you’ll be thinking. What is onomatopoeia? Well simple to answer. Onomatopoeia is something that sounds like what it means such as swoosh and rustle.

The last thing I would like to share in my writing is similes. We have found over ten already in the “BFG” by Roald Dahl, and we haven’t even finished the book. I’ve done it again. I’ve forgotten to explain what similes are. Similes are comparing one thing with another such as, he watched the ball like an eagle watches his prey, or his cheeks blew up like huge ripe tomatoes.

Add all these things to your writing and your writing can become much, much more interesting, the same as all of ours’.

I’ve enjoyed writing this term a lot. Most of us have improved our writing a lot just by adding these things.

By Megan

Construction Thinker's Key

Yesterday the 21st of September guess what our class did for Construction Thinker’s Key … We were challenged to make lunchboxes in pairs with only one A3 piece of card and 1 metre of sellotape that would fit an apple and a sandwich in it. First we found out who our buddies were then drew the design on our jotter pads. My buddy was Finn. Next we made a draft lunchbox and tried to fit the apple and sandwich in it. After that we showed Mrs Bryant our draft and worked out if we could get it out of the A3 card. If it met the challenge we took a piece of card to get started on our good copy. Then we drew our shape on the card we cut it out and taped it together. Once our lunchboxes had been constructed we decorated them with things like pictures, scraps of paper and even stickers if we owned some. When we had finished decorating our lunchboxes they looked as beautiful as princesses so Mrs Bryant took some photos of the finished good copies with the draft together with the apple and sandwich inside the good box to put the photos on the class blog and here they are!
    -Megan

Money

A lady called Holly came to visit our class to talk about saving our money. First she talked about money from other countries in the world which is called currencies. Money from South Africa is called rands and money from India is called rupees. She told us about eftpos cards and that having one is like taking our money round with us. It’s important to spend money on what you need before what you want. It’s important to save up money for when you need it.
At the end of her visit she picked out people to act out shop keepers and cash machines. She pretended to buy something and then come to a shop with no eftpos and went to a cash machine but had run out of money in her account. We enjoyed Holly’s visit. It was great.

Eating lettuce

The best part had finally come. It was time to eat the lettuces in wraps with marmite and cheese. Yummy.

Kowhaiwhai

Last Friday the Middle School Syndicate did some Maori art work called Kowhaiwhai with Cindy. 

We did some sewing of patterns that told stories.

We drew patterns then cut them out and glued them to black paper to make a story about New Zealand and the early settlers.