5 things I hope my Year 5s will remember for next week's writing test

1. PARAGRAPHS! I don't want them to annoy the markers before they even start reading - if the sight of a page full of unbroken text makes my heart sink, think what it will do to someone who's spent days in a hard plastic chair reading bad writing.

2. Full stops and commas. Hopefully this will come in during their 5 minutes editing time. We're doing a short run on sentence lesson tomorrow.

3. Interesting starts. If I read 'once there was . . . ' one more time, I may have to eat their paper.

4. Showing not telling. One of my darlings actually wrote a fake street address rather than describing the house. It's like all descriptive words disappear when they hit test conditions.

5. Varied vocabulary. Call it the cult of 'nice', but for some reason students continue to use 'fun', 'nice' 'tall' . . .

And what I hope they keep for next week:

Their lovely creative stories. Where else am I going to read about Hovering Airconditioners or Memory sticks which come to life??