Discuss with the children some of the special vocabulary and sentence structures that should be used when writing recounts of activities to add to pages in the scrapbook.

Throughout the summer holidays, the children can collect information about places that they have visited with their family and friends. Get them to stick photographs, natural materials and other souvenirs into pages in the scrapbook to build up the story of their summer holiday which they can then share with their new class teacher when returning back to school in September. This activity can ease the children’s transition into a new year group and can act as an excellent starting point for a classroom topic.

Preparations
You should allocate some time at the end of the school year allowing the children to make preparations for compiling their scrapbook over the school summer holidays. Spend time modelling how to organise information on a page in a scrapbook including a description of an activity with matching illustrations and collected souvenirs. The children can build their scrapbooks by folding and stapling sugar paper to form the pages. They can include a front cover with pictures of some their intended activities for the summer holidays. The children can then use each page to describe what happened during one week in their holiday or they can use each page to describe what happened for a specific activity such as spending the day at the seaside or visiting some relatives in another part of the country. The children should not feel over-burdened about completing their scrapbook but should relish the opportunity to keep a record of their summer activities to look back over in future years. Completing small pieces of written work over the summer holidays will enable the children to maintain and refine their literacy skills when way from school over the long summer holiday.

Recount Writing
Towards the end of the summer term provide the children with a range of opportunities to practise recount writing which they will then be able to employ when compiling pages for their scrapbook. Help the class understand how to compose a recount text by recording events in a chronological order using past tense vocabulary. Get the children to differentiate between recounts when they might use more informal or formal language. Encourage the children to think of their writing in a scrapbook as diary entries about their own lives. When teaching the children how to write recounts you can model how to use adverbials of time to indicate the timing of different events in their recounts. You can show the class the importance of using the correct verb tenses when constructing sentences for a recount of a past activity

Summer Plans
The children can use the first page of their scrapbook to record some of their plans and wishes for the summer holidays by writing a letter to their parents outlining activities that they would like to take part in with other members of their family and friends during the forthcoming summer holiday. Get the children to write their letters without any support so that it stands as a record of their writing skills at the end of the school year. The children’s new teacher will then be able to use the letters at the front of the scrapbooks to assess the children’s progress in writing and set goals and targets for the new school year. The children could also make a checklist of activities for their summer holiday which they can then tick when a particular activity has been completed.

Holiday Souvenirs
Encourage the children to add interest to their scrapbooks by sticking in photographs, tourist leaflets and collected natural materials to show activities that they have participated in during the summer holidays. For example, if the children have visited the seaside with their family then they could produce a page containing a photo of their family at the beach, examples of leaflets showing some of the attractions that they used at the beach and samples of small interesting shells that they have collected on the beach. The children should then try arranging the collected media on a page in their scrapbook to accompany some recounts about what happened. If the children have time they can also include speech bubbles showing what different members of their family said about a specific event during the school summer holidays.

New Class
When the children return to school in September they can share their completed scrapbooks with their new teacher. The written recounts in the text can then help the children’s new teacher assess their abilities in written literacy so that individual targets can be set for the forthcoming term. The children can also share their completed scrapbooks with other members of their class as part of a back to school topic where the children build on previous work. The class can practise polishing and redrafting a page from their scrapbook to build a display presenting the children’s summer holidays. You could stick a map on a display board to link with pages from the children’s scrapbooks to indicate locations visited by the class in the UK and around the world. Allow some children to share their completed scrapbooks with the class at the end of each school day.

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