Writing meaningful text: vocabulary knowledge resources

Students create character vignettes with a focus on writing pieces that are brief, descriptive and set in one point in time. They should not be concerned with plot. As the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity, students need to show a controlled and elegant skill in writing, and to use figurative language to 'show' rather than 'tell'.

Students first do the science activity Throwing balloons 3 or Throwing balloons 4 where they predict, observe, and explain what will happen when a balloon containing another balloon filled with water is thrown. Then the students do this resource's writing task where they describe the balloon and what happens when it is thrown, and explain why they think it moved the way it did. Six annotated exemplars of student scripts (writing) are included under the "Working with Students" tab.

This resource assesses grammar knowledge. Students identify the adjectives in a short story about making breakfast.

Students are required to identify the verbs in a short story about a boy jumping off a diving board.

Students are assessed on their knowledge of parts of speech. They work through a short text and identify the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Students select answers that demonstrate their understanding of alphabetical order.

Students read a letter written to the Board of Trustees, and make it more formal by writing the contractions as full words.

Students will identify and use nouns, adjectives, and verbs to write a poem that follows the same structure as given in two examples.

An example of a personal letter provides the context, with questions about letter formats and abbreviations being the assessment focus.

Students identify common spelling errors, taken from the essential word lists, and write the identified errors correctly. Students also identify lines of text without errors.

Students are required to identify the nouns and proper nouns in a short story about a class trip to the zoo.

Students expand common contractions to their full form, then write the contracted forms of other common two-word phrases.

Students identify whether to use 'there' or 'their' in a piece of student writing.