Writing exciting sentences - cats in the city

We're preparing for some Varjak Paw-style writing in Year 4. The cats are prowling through the city, hungry, fearful of the dangerous gangs of cats, fearful of the Vanishings. The look, listen, sniff the air...

To help us with this writing we've done a number of things.

Firstly, we've wandered through Marseilles a little. This has helped us to imagine the scene in more detail.

We've also looked at using exciting sentences to make our writing more varied and interesting.

Look at these two sentences:

Can you see the pattern?

Sorrow, graffiti, darkness - why was the city so cruel?
Rubbishy, smelly, old - what type of disgusting place is this?

They're called 3 bad - (dash) question sentences.They start with three bad nouns or adjectives - are followed by a dash - and then a question. (Of course, this can be varied.)

Have a look at some of our practice Emotion word, (comma) sentences and 3 bad - (dash) question sentences, plus some of the images we used:



Once again, thanks to Alan Peat for his taxonomy of exciting sentences!