What sort of place was Benin 500 to 1,000

years ago?You have two weeks for this task as I want you to do a high quality job. We normally take this amount of time to complete writing tasks in class as there is so much involved. You need to make sure your grammar and vocab are tip top. You are going to answer the question above by planning and writing a detailed description. Your finished work will be presented beautifully to form part of your Benin project, so it has to be A-M-A-Z-ING peeps…SKILLS:I have found some tasks and lessons that will help you with some of the criteria for the writing task. It’s not a good idea to do them all in one go, so use them as a lesson/skills starter for up to 30 mins each day (it’s hard to know how long they will take you so this is just a guide). Dip in and out throughout the week. Go back over things if you need to. As you have these to do, I have not set any grammar tasks on Reading Eggspress this week, only spelling and reading. Ok, here we go…Type BBC Schools Daily into your search engine. Click on the link, the page looks like this:

Click/tap on Primary and scroll down to England KS2:

Click/tap on Start a Lesson, and then Year 4. Whether you are Year 4 or Year 5 I would like you to complete the lessons for 22nd April (Past Tense Verbs and Families), 23rd April (Adding Description) and 27th April (Preopsitions).

THE WRITING TASK:1. Before you can put your show pants on you have to

know what you’re talking about, otherwise your work will be a different kind of pants…To help remind you how to look for key points, you need to complete some lessons on fact retrieval. These can be found here:  https://www.thenational.academy/online-classroom

Click/tap on Classroom, Subject and then Year 5 before choosing English. As before, do this whether you are in Year 4 or Year 5.

2. Next, you need our trusty BBC Schools site. Type ‘BBC Schools Benin’ into your browser. There will be a few choices, but if you then click/tap on the option below, it will take you to the contents…OR skip all that and just click/tap it here:

Kingdom of Benin - KS2 History - BBC Bitesize Once you are there, go to ‘The Kingdom of Benin’ and find this image:

When you click/tap on it you will be able to hear a real account of what the merchants saw in Benin, put together by a Dutch writer called Olfert Dapper in the year 1668. I have also made a file of the transcript, so you can follow this as you listen. I suggest you listen a few times and make notes on the transcript, as well as highlighting the technical words….

3. OK, so you should now have a little bit of an idea of some aspects of life in Benin all that time ago…but hearing about a king’s parade isn’t enough to make your writing A-M-A-Z-ING. You need more info, so back to the BBC you go! This time, please go back to the contents and click/tap on What was life like in Benin?

Here you will have a fair bit of choice of things to read, so fill your boots and find out what you can…4. Once you feel you know a fair bit print off, or write

out, the Boxed Up Plan. Here you will see categories, these are the only things I would like you to focus on, so make sure you just look at those areas from now on as this will enable you to keep your writing clear and to the point.

You will see that I have been EXTREMELY KIND because I have put a couple of things in each section already. So your job now is to fill the sections with AT LEAST four more facts…

5. Finally, please use the criteria on the SLOW writing file to turn your notes into full sentences. I have also posted some word mats and prompt sheets onto the website to help you. I will leave the presentation of your writing up to you. If you wish, you can print off the blank border page (scroll down) and just write three paragraphs of information with headings. I like the idea of writing the information within a triangle to show the hierarchy, but you could create a poster, a booklet or concertina book, even fact cards, a newspaper report or a scroll…whatever takes your fancy and will work well with your project. Please also add appropriate illustrations to your writing.