Writing non-fiction booklets with Year R/ Year 1

We had an 'Under the Sea' topic, and I wanted to do a longer piece of writing with my more able Year R/less able Year 1's.  I chose to do non-fiction books about some fish seen on Endless Ocean. We played the game and took notes about the fish we selected. I supported the children with the reading, and they wrote three of four words on each fish to keep as notes.
In the next few lessons we wrote the notes up as sentences, with lots off verbal work to help them with their sentence construction, although they became more confident as we went along. They had phonememe and word mats to support them. I provided the photos, paper, booklets, which they loved.
We had already done a lot of work as a whole class about the features of non-fiction books including contents and blurb so they were familiar with the text type before we started.

 Year 1 child

 Year 1 child with some difficulty in writing; this book motivated them to write more than they had ever done!

YR child wrote these sentences independently using her phonics.

Overall I found the children were eager to write, gave a lot more in terms of quantity and were very proud of their books.