After Ioan learnt to ride his bike without stabilisers, he told Miss Edwards, his teacher. She mentioned that she still has stabilisers on her bike. Ioan was so amazed, he decided to write a newspaper article for her.

Resources

  • Paper
  • Pencil
  • Two printed pictures for the article

Method

We talked about the features of a newspaper article:

  • A short and snappy headline.
  • Sum up what the story is about in your first sentence.
  • Write your newspaper report in the past tense.
  • Remember to use third person. That is writing from the third-person point of view, or an outsider looking in, and uses pronouns like he, she, it, or they.
  • Split your newspaper report up into paragraphs to help the reader clearly understand the information.
  • If you use quotes to make your report more interesting, don’t forget to use speech marks!
  • Use a photo with a caption to give the reader more information.
  • Include both facts and opinions in your newspaper report.

Ioan’s finished newspaper report:

DfES Outcomes for EYFS and National Curriculum (2013)

English Year 2 programme of study

Writing – Handwriting

  • Form lower-case letters of the correct size relative to one another
  • Start using some of the diagonal and horizontal strokes needed to join letters and understand which letters, when adjacent to one another, are best left unjoined
  • Write capital letters and digits of the correct size, orientation and relationship to one another and to lower case letters
  • Use spacing between words that reflects the size of the letters.

Writing – Composition

  • Develop positive attitudes towards and stamina for writing by:
    • writing narratives about personal experiences and those of others (real and fictional)
    • writing about real events
    • writing for different purposes
  • Consider what they are going to write before beginning by:
    • planning or saying out loud what they are going to write about
    • writing down ideas and/or key words, including new vocabulary
    • encapsulating what they want to say, sentence by sentence
  • Make simple additions, revisions and corrections to their own writing by:
    • evaluating their writing with the teacher and other pupils
    • re-reading to check that their writing makes sense and that verbs to indicate time are used correctly and consistently, including verbs in the continuous form
    • proof-reading to check for errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation [for example, ends of sentences punctuated correctly]
  • Read aloud what they have written with appropriate intonation to make the meaning clear.

Writing – vocabulary, grammar and punctuation

  • Develop their understanding by learning how to use both familiar and new punctuation correctly, including:
    • full stops
    • capital letters
    • exclamation marks
    • question marks
    • commas for lists
    • apostrophes for contracted forms
  • Learn how to use sentences with different forms:
    • statement
    • question
    • exclamation
    • command
  • Use expanded noun phrases to describe and specify [for example, the blue butterfly]
  • Use the present and past tenses correctly and consistently including the progressive form
  • Subordination (using when, if, that, or because) and co-ordination (using or, and, or but)