Let's play darts: an update

 

Last weekend I wrote about the dartbard writing activity that I had learned about via Twitter.  This week I tried it for the first time with my excellent Year 4 class.  We have done a lot of work this year on opinions of foods and drinks, and are now working on the weather.  The children are revisiting and recycling their knowledge of opinions to talk about opinions of weather.

The children said that they enjoyed the activity, and particularly enjoyed the challenge of remembering and looking for the correct words and phrases.  I asked them to do as much as possible from memory, and if they had to check the answers to note at the bottom of the instructions what they had used (they have a sentence builder and a knowledge organiser).

I divided the questions into 4 quarters of complexity, as I had suggested in my previous post.  The coloured-in dartboard on this child's work shows me very clearly that she needs a bit more practice of the more complex sentences, in particular with working out whether a singular or a plural opinion is needed.  I was really pleased to see that she had corrected her work as she checked it.

One thing I would say is that the accuracy of the marking by many of the children left a lot to be desired!  Particularly with things like me gusta vs me gustan, they hadn't checked the spellings carefully enough, and hadn't checked their definite articles.  Next lesson we will be practising checking our own work very carefully and talking about the difference that spelling errors and missed out words make to grammar and therefore meaning.

When I displayed the answers for the children, I displayed this grid and left them to it:

I think next time I will animate the answers to appear one by one, and talk the children through the things that they should be looking out for when checking their work.

I hope this helps you if you are thinking of having a go at this activity!