Have you seen or heard about the Abbeyfields mystery?…On Monday the whole school was buzzing with excitement about a mystery tent that had appeared on the grass at the front of school. Who could the tent belong to? Why was it there? What was going on? The children had lots of different theories – some wild and fantastic, others quite practical and reasonable.
Miss Halliford and Miss Grieve decided to throw the lesson plans out of the window, and instead, the Year 4 children turned into journalists, the classrooms turned into a ‘newsroom’ and the children were placed into teams, with the joint aim of writing a newspaper all about the mystery playing out at school. Journalists on the Investigative Team wrote questions for witness and suspects, before carrying out interviews and writing articles with both reported and directed speech. Journalists on the Reporting Team wrote articles to inform the reader about Monday’s event, or articles to persuade the reader that a certain person was responsible. They made sure to write in the third person, to use the past tense and include information to tell the reader about the 5Ws (who, what, where, when and why!) This team also surveyed children on the yard at playtime to gather information about the children’s suspicions to include in their articles. Journalists on the Photography Team took photographs at the scene and then used the photos to create captions to support the articles and keep the readers interest. They used alliteration, puns and rhyme to make their captions super catchy.
All of the children were later drafted onto the Advertising Team and were asked to create advertisements to be featured in the Newspaper – mainly offering cut price camping equipment!
On Wednesday afternoon, Miss Halliford and Miss Grieve rigged up a portable CCTV camera with the aim of catching the culprit in the act…and the children are currently waiting to see whether we can solve the mystery! Why not ask your child about it tonight? Did they guess who the culprit was? Keep a look out on the website and on twitter for more updates and the results of Year 4s fabulous work.
