Literacy - 8 to 9-year-olds

My Year 3 class was using the book I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole by Nigel Gray and Michael Foreman to investigate settings. Rather than use the illustrations in the book, I decided the children should draw their own scary house then describe it. Each child had a piece of A4 paper. All drew the outline of a house.

After a turn of the sand timer, these were passed to the next child in the group. Windows and a door were added. Again, the papers were passed round. I included instructions, such as “draw three spiders” and “add a ghost”.

When the collaborative houses were completed, the children wrote descriptive sentences or phrases on the picture in front of them until our sand timer ran out, then passed it on. Lower-ability children labelled parts of the house adding an adjective.

The session was a lot of fun. For the follow-up, each child had a useful illustration and set of ideas to develop into a descriptive paragraph

Rita Pike is a Year 3 teacher and literacy co-ordinator at Our Lady Star of the Sea Primary School in Seaforth, Liverpool.