This week in English, we have’ wrapped up’ our half term unit using different versions of the Cinderella story as stimuli. The skill focus for this week was to understand the purpose of inverted commas used to mark speech, and to create their own speech sentences using inverted commas in the correct place. After exploring examples of speech in The Egyptian Cinderella, the children were able to identify that speech sentences are made of two parts: the spoken word and the reporting clause. In pairs, the children identified and highlighted the spoken word by reading and acting out different speech sentences. They then added inverted commas to open and close the spoken words. In their books, the children created their own speech sentences, based on the Egyptian Cinderella, by punctuating the spoken words and adding their own reporting clause using an appropriate verb to describe how the words were spoken. At the end of this week, the children made their final comparisons between the two versions of the Cinderella story – Prince Cinders and The Egyptian Cinderella. They used a Venn diagram to compare and contrast key elements from both stories by identifying which characters, events and themes were found in just one or both versions. They also had the opportunity to express their own opinions about the stories and explain which version was their favourite.
