Holidays: Updated February

Half term is here!!!! Meaning I finally have time to update this! 
I really was pleased with how well this topic went. It is usually only found in KS1 but this was definitely a challenging KS2 topic.  

English: Reviews

We started with amateur reviews from Trip Advisor. First, we looked at some. It was harder than you'd imagine to find some that were suitable, so I have attached mine below the pic to save you a job if you decide to do this! We pulled out the features and thought about their content. As you can see, some children couldn't resist correcting the mistakes in them too!

example_reviews.pdf
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features_of_reviews.pdf
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After finding the features, we then went on to panning our own. We've been working on writing in notes when planning, which is coming on. Oh, and they LOVED creating their profile! I tweaked the planning sheet a bit after using it and have attached the improved one below. 

plan_a_review.pdf
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You can guess what's coming next...we wrote them! However, we did this with a twist. I realised a while ago that my chatty children tend to...shall we say...take after their teacher! In short, they are wafflers! So, to combat this, I had them write their reviews on the computers. As you can imagine this helped in no way, as expected. However, I then showed them how to find their word count and (after working out for myself!) how to use the 'Review' tools on Word. Now, this is a little confusing, as it has nothing to do with writing a review! The name refers to 'reviewing' your work.

Here's a quick run-down of how to use these tools. I have written a short paragraph of nonsense with which to demonstrate! Take a look. 

So, after learning how to do this, I challenged the children to cut their review down to 120 words. This was a great challenge and we learnt the words concise and succinct​ very quickly! 

As you can see, we added comments too. You'll find these in the same 'Review' section of Word. 

After this work on amateur, informal reviews, we moved on to professional ones. We used a Venn diagram to compare them - like the Maths link?

Then, we looked at formal language and wrote some 'professional' reviews of our own.