Good morning everyone!

Today, I’m here to share some of the amazing work my kids have been doing recently.

Now, if you’re a browser of EduTwitter or EduFacebook, you’ll know that double page spreads are a THING. I see other teachers’ posts about them and I just think ‘my gosh these are amazing, I’d love to give that a go’. So… for the first time, we gave them a go!

We’ve been doing travel writing for the past few weeks. We went through the whole process of looking at travel writing, watching adverts, reading websites/brochures about vising places, exploring the different kinds of activities people like to do on holiday. We thought about our target audiences and who we would like to market our location to. Each of the children designed their own island and then they had to create a double page spread as if it was in a brochure… and honestly? I am so incredibly proud of them. For our first go, some of them are absolutely incredible.

We had “boxed up” our travel writing texts and then I kind of gave them free reign over how they presented it. I showed them some examples I found on the internet and they used them as inspiration.

I think if I was going to do this again, there’s a few things I’d change, but the most important ones?

I’d DEFINITELY give them time to think about what they want their design to look like. A few of them found it quite hard to just off the bat think about where things go and what makes sense to do; some of them just did nothing and some of them just coloured EVERYTHING in (not thinking about their target audience and their purpose for the illustrations). We give them lots of time to plan their writing, so I should’ve given them more time to plan what their presentation will look like.

I’d do MORE modelling of why my model is structured the way it is – now this one is a little unfair on myself because we started this topic remotely and then we continued it in school. If I were to do this again (which I’d quite like to do because actually the kids and I enjoyed it and we got some amazing pieces of work from it), I’d spend more time talking through my reasons for creating my model as I did. Some of my kids understood why certain things worked and why others didn’t, but I think it’s important that next time, I make it explicit to all.

We REALLY enjoyed doing this and I can’t wait to see how else we can use double spreads in my classroom – I’m already thinking of doing it for rainforests (which we’re doing in Geography at the minute!) so if you’ve got any words of wisdom/resources that can help, I’d love to hear from you!

I hope you enjoyed this little dive into my classroom!

S x