A Sense of Place - Brookmead's Found Words

Inspired by Robert Macfarlane's book Lost Words which we had been exploring in assemblies last term, we used the theme of A Sense of Place to draw on the rich resource within our local area and deepen our technical and descriptive vocabulary to develop a shared understanding and knowledge across the school. We exhibited our work in a whole-school exhibition in September which also helped provide a purpose for our writing.The purpose of the project was to:create a shared understanding of our sense of place and be able to articulate this using a wider range of vocabulary and technical terminology;

create a model of meaningful vocabulary extension that fosters “word consciousness” (e.g. sharing the etymology and morphology of words) that helps address the ‘vocabulary gap’;

nurture interest and confidence in understanding families of words, having insight into their origins and the inter-connectedness of meaning;

use our newly acquired vocabulary knowledge in our talking and writing about characteristics and features of our local area.