Our writing this week was quite simple – sort of. We started out by looking at a story/poem from a school journal: Recipe for a Saturday Morning. Then each group started off by brainstorming all the things they thought they should take with them on an island holiday (I had a stunning picture of sunset in the Faroe Islands as the starter). These were saved as a group to the wiki.

The next day I put the brainstorm up for them to see – all the groups at once – and asked them to write the top 5 things they would take (as individuals) in their draft books. These top 5 things were then saved to their group writing wiki.

I put the starter picture in a voicethread and asked them to publish their top 5 to the VT (embedded below).

I also got each child to dictate their words to me for a whole class wordle. I used the wordle to whittle down our list of 135 words to 6 words – wordle made that quite an easy task.

Original wordle

Final wordle

Then today we looked at the 6 words and each group drafted a phrase for each word. Then we looked at what each group had come up with and chose the best – mostly the groups all agreed that one was better than the rest (except the last so I just wrote up “a sleeping bag”).

Recipe for an Island Holiday

• a suitcase full of clothes
• 5 large bags of food
• hooray it’s payday, a wallet full of money
• a tank full of water
• a tube full of toothpaste
• a sleeping bag

We then published the final work to the class blog. A huge amount of work for a simple result.