Corpus Christi

This half term Year 5 have been reading the novel Holes by Louis Sachar. The novel is set in the fictional Camp Green Lake, a juvenile correctional facility in America. Stanley Yelnats is convicted of a crime and is sent to the camp to dig a hole a day for the duration of his sentence, the idea that in doing so he will ‘turn from a bad boy into a good boy’. Whilst staying at the camp he makes some friends, some enemies and goes on a journey of discovery.

Year 5 have thoroughly enjoyed reading the book together and we have used it as a basis for the teaching of writing. We began the term focusing on describing the camp using ambitious vocabulary. This linked beautifully with last year’s Geography topic of Deserts and you could tell that rich vocabulary was embedded into the children’s knowledge. They were also reintroduced to abstract nouns and did brilliantly at including these in their writing.

Following on from this we started to think about writing in role and from a first person perspective. We looked at levels of formality and wrote a very informal diary entry as one of the characters in the book. The children thoroughly enjoyed writing as X-ray and it was a lot of fun to read their work.

To build on this we began writing as Stanley to his mum in a letter. This was also informal but not as informal as the diary entry. We also had to work hard to flip the description of the camp to make it sound like a positive experience.

Our final piece of work connected to the text focused on persuasion. We will have a debate when we finish the text about whether we agree that the camp will turn bad boys into good boys and try to give examples from the text to back this up. To begin thinking about persuasive writing we looked at the features and had a go at including these in a piece of work about Room 101. It was really interesting to see what children would put in there! One of my favourites was the following piece:

Room 101

The thing I would love to see vanish forever is war because it is taking away more and more humans from the world through bloodshed. If this doesn’t stop there will be no more humans left to fight with. So I say let the war stop, let the war stop, let the war stop! Who’s with me?

Besides the men and women who fight those wars for us have families. How would you feel if you had a husband or wife and they joined the army but never came back because he or she got shot? Or what about their children. How would they feel?