Super Sentences Inspired by Stanley’s Stick

This half term, our new story has been Stanley’s Stick by John Hegley and Neal Layton. The children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring this imaginative tale about a little boy called Stanley who finds a stick and turns it into all sorts of exciting things. Throughout the story, Stanley’s stick becomes a banana, a rocket, a Stickosaurus, a pen and much more! It quickly becomes Stanley’s best friend because it can be whatever he wants it to be.

When Stanley goes on holiday, he makes the difficult decision to let someone else enjoy the stick. He releases it into the ocean and watches it float away on a new adventure. This part of the story inspired our writing today.

Before we began writing, we used a little bit of role play to help us really get into the character of Stanley. The children imagined they were standing on the beach, watching their special stick drift away. Using a microphone, they practised sharing their ideas out loud, speaking as Stanley and thinking carefully about how he might be feeling. This helped the children to develop some thoughtful and imaginative ideas before putting pen to paper.

The children then imagined that they were Stanley and wrote about how he was feeling as he let go of his beloved stick. We practised writing in the first person using the pronoun ‘I’ to help us step into Stanley’s shoes and express his thoughts and emotions. The children came up with some fantastic ideas, describing feelings such as sadness, pride, excitement and loneliness as the stick drifted away.

Some of us challenged ourselves even further by including conjunctions such as ‘because’ and ‘but’ in our sentences. We were so impressed by the children's determination to make their writing even more detailed and interesting.

As always, we took great care with our presentation. The children worked hard to form their letters correctly, remembered to leave clear finger spaces between words and produced beautiful handwriting. Most importantly, they filled their writing with brilliant ideas!

We are incredibly proud of all the children and the wonderful progress they are making in their writing. Well done, Year 1!