The Writing Trail in Year 3

After reading Tomi Ungerer’s Moon Man, Year 3 students have spent the last three weeks creating persuasive letters to Moon Man, with the aim of convincing him to return to Earth.

During the first week of the unit, the students immersed themselves in the story by carefully considering Moon Man’s emotions throughout his journey. To demonstrate their understanding, they used cross-curricular skills to create a ‘feelings chart,’ providing clear justifications for how and why the main character felt during his first adventure on Earth.

The students were then exposed to high-quality example texts. Working as writers and readers, they identified specific features that they could later apply to their own writing.

These included:

•Clearly explaining why they were writing to Moon Man
•Using paragraphs accurately
•Using a range of paragraph openers
•Applying the features of AFOREST: Alliteration, Facts, Opinions, Rhetorical Questions, Emotive Language, Statistics and the Rule of Three

Throughout the writing process, the children worked collaboratively with their teachers to create shared writes. This gave students the opportunity to work alongside experienced teachers while seeing the thought processes behind effective writing. Metacognition played an important role in this process, as teachers made their decision-making explicit and modelled how writers plan, construct and improve their ideas.

Finally, the students have written their own persuasive letters to Moon Man. Once they have finished analysing and evaluating their work, Year 3 parents can look forward to seeing and hearing the final pieces on Toddle next week!

We have been incredibly impressed by the creativity, thoughtfulness and persuasive language the children have demonstrated throughout this unit. We are sure this will continue when the students next create instructional reports on how to visit Moon Man on the Moon!

By Michael Graham

Assistant Head (Academics) of Primary, Year 3 Deer Class Teacher