Year 5 Expectations!

It is great to start the year off with a display of your expectations of the children for the year. My display is a combination of behaviour expectations and the expectation of the presentation of their work. I have included tips and hints for both as well as including some quality examples of Year 5 work from last year to show the children what they aspire to achieve by the end of the year. Around the edge of the display I displayed some of the children's wishes about their year ahead. This serves as a little reminder about what they said at the beginning of the year they would like to achieve by the end!

You will notice on this display (and some of my others) I am starting to label things and write things up onto the display in my own handwriting. Presentation and joined up handwriting is a whole school focus for improvement and what better way for the children to learn how to write joined up than for the teacher to be modelling this every day as well as on the displays. I definitely think there is a place for typed up text and handwritten text on your displays! 

Writing Reminders!

Stuck to the side of my whiteboard I have writing reminders! These are to help the children self check their work when they are finished. My general WILF for any long piece of writing! The children know what the symbols mean and I use these in my marking! 

A . - capital letters and full stops

WOW - adjectives

and - connectives

ly - adverbs

abc - joined up neat handwriting

thinking face - does my sentence make sense?

Handwriting Display!

To encourage the children to improve their handwriting we hand out pen licences to those who have neat, fluent and joined up handwriting. Here is a photo of my latest handwriting display for those who have received their pen licence recently.

In the background, directly onto the window, I painted lines of the alphabet using joined up writing. This set as a nice background to display their certificates. 

Around the certificates I have included top tips for getting neat handwriting as well as reasons why it is important! The children loved seeing their photograph on display and are very proud of their latest achievement.

Handwriting Display

To motivate the children to improve their handwriting we introduced pen licences. The children had to use joined up fluent handwriting to be awarded a pen and certificate. The children could use their pen for whatever written work they liked (usually not maths) but could only keep the licence if they continued to use joined up neat and fluent handwriting across all curriculum subjects. The children felt very proud to earn the licence and badges were given out for the children to wear around the school if they wished. Photographs of the children who were awarded the pen licences were put on the handwriting display along with their certificates.  Examples of children's work which met the criteria for the pen licence was displayed on the board for the children to see what they were working towards. This had a marked impact on the children's handwriting and this reward system has now been implemented throughout school from Years 2 - 6.