This was a really successful project I did in literacy with my Year 6 class. We started by watching ‘The Silence Beneath the Bark’, a short film on YouTube which helped to hook the children into the project. We then went outside so that the children could build the creatures a home in our nature area. I have done this in all weathers and it works well each time. Following this (and still outside) the children created designs and wrote a whole variety of genres of writing; stories, estate agent descriptions, fact sheets and letters to the creatures.
To help facilitate the writing I hung Year 6 appropriate modelled vocabulary in the trees around the area in which they were working. I also spent time looking at each house with the children and talking and describing them encouraging the use of ambitious vocabulary. On returning to the classroom the children wanted to make clay models of the creatures and read stories they had written to the creatures. Following this piece of work our Reception class used the houses as a stimulus for their own work involving fairy houses.
You might think ‘Fairy Houses’ would turn off year 6 boys but because the lessons were so active and free the opposite happened and some of their best pieces of writing were stimulated by this project.