Today we began our lesson by critiquing the best answer for the given question, ‘Why had the engineers taken extra care when building the Vostok?’. We then looked through some ‘reasons to read’ together linked to a range of different HOB lenses such as ‘logical meaning making’ and ‘trawling for evidence’. We took it in turns to read the different questions and unpick the vocabulary used to help us to understand what information was required such as, ‘How long…’ meaning that we needed to look for a time (minutes, years, months, years etc.). We used our skimming and scanning skills (with a little help from our rulers and highlighters) to retrieve the answers from the text. Once we had located the information we explained our answers using the evidence that we had found to support our answer (A.P.E). Mrs Elmer then supported us with recording our answers. Mrs Elmer modelled the first one, we did the second one together and then in pairs we had a go at the final one! We then concluded the lesson by sharing our personal opinion on the story.

To begin today’s session we recapped some of the new vocabulary that we identified in lesson 1 of Book Talk such as, ‘override’, ‘pacing’, ‘vast’, ‘mesmerised’ and ‘observation’. We ensured that we all knew what the words meant and discussed how they had been used in the text by the author. We then worked with our partners to read the text. We took it in turns to read sentences/paragraphs/whole pages each. We listened and observed carefully so that we could critique how well our partner had used the punctuation such as commas and full stops in the text. We then went through some reasons to read together which required us to use our skimming and scanning skills to allow us to retrieve information from the text. We were fab at this! We then completed a true or false quiz based on what we had read. We then completed the session by listing 3 facts, 2 opinions and 1 question. Another great Book Talk session Crew Elmer! Well done!