On Wednesday 13th November 2019 St Mark’s took part in ‘No Pens Wednesday’ in partnership with I CAN the communication trust, where our pens and pencils were put to one side and the day is devoted to speaking and listening instead.
The Communication Trust make oracy a number one priority and remind us that ‘Of all the skills we develop at school, the ability to communicate effectively is the one that has the most profound and potentially positive impact on our lives.’
Some things our children said about the day:
- Reception “It’s such a great day – the best day ever”
- Year 5 “It’s been great to work in different ways together”
- Year 2 “We have had fun and learnt if a different way”
Here are some of the things the school got up to:
Reception wrote their sounds in shaving foam, sand and glitter. We also used the outdoor area to complete a sounds hunt and role-played a story from the bible. We had a fabulous day!
In Year 1, we played addition board games in Maths. In Literacy, we role-played the story of The Scarecrows’ Wedding. In RE, we listened to the story of The Presentation of Jesus and then we acted it out.
In Year 2, we played a game where we had to find people who had a word that meant the same as our word. Then, we practised spelling our Year 1 and Year 2 common exception words by making the letters out of scrap paper. In our Maths learning, we practised finding the inverse calculation by showing this with our cubes.
In Year 3, we completed no pens Wednesday by role playing some of our literacy story instead of writing it out. The children really enjoyed not writing for a day!
In Year 4 as part of No Pen’s Day, we completed our maths lesson on factors using smarties. We arranged the smarties in a variety of arrays to find factor pairs of a range of numbers.
In Year 5, we acted out different parts of the Butterfly Lion. We had to take on the role of one of the characters in the story and present our freeze frames to the class. We thought a lot about how we could show how the character is feeling.
In Year 6, we acted out our Anti-bullying stories, demonstrating how we can use show not tell to make our writing more powerful. In maths, we completed puzzles working in different groups. They were tricky! In the afternoon, we practised our recorders – we are currently learning ‘Silent Night’ in time for Christmas!
