This week we were focussing on the book Where the Forest Meets the Sea and we were looking at expanding the simple sentences in the book into paragraphs. This included using our senses to think about what else was in the picture and how we could extend the text provided by the author.
For my more-able groups, I chose to extend them a bit further by including Google Docs. The book has just 14 pages and I had 14 children in these two groups so it worked out quite nicely. I scanned the book in and added each picture to a slide on a Google presentation. I then shared the file with the children with full editing rights. Although 12 of them had never used Google Docs before, within 5 minutes they were happy and were editing the text.
They were using a mixture of similes, adjectives and adverbs but also including the challenges I gave them using the sentences from Alan Peat’s book too. Within 20 minutes the children had then created their own version of the book! Also, as the document was shared I could let them peer-assess each others pages and check spelling and grammar errors. What happened though was that they also started suggesting better words too.
Here is an example page from Eleanor in Year 3.
