This week, Crew Hamill have delved deeper into the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We looked further at key vocabulary within the story and practised our skimming and scanning skills by finding them in a word search. We have had a big fluency focus this week and each day we have focused on a different element – pausing, pace, accuracy and expression/intonation. For book talk, we read through the text and focused on pausing at punctuation to ensure our reading made sense. We then text marked our section of the text, identifying vocabulary words, important parts, parts that were exciting and parts that we loved. Once we had completed this, we answered quick fire questions about what we had read. For our second book talk lesson, we focused on pace as we read, ensuring we were reading at an appropriate pace – not too fast or too slow. We then continued with our retrieval and fluency focus, answering questions – first guided and then paired – about what we had read.

This week, Crew Hamill have really enjoyed our reading book. To begin with, we were a little confused as to what ‘The Invisible Clothes’ might be and we made predictions that it might be clothes that turned you invisible once you were wearing them – a little bit like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Once we had analysed some of the vocabulary and read a brief introduction to the story, we realised that it was actually about a tailor who was tricking someone into buying ‘invisible’ clothes. He was actually stealing the Emperor’s money and pretending to make clothes for him! We have loved reading this story and finding out if the Emperor would be silly enough to go along with the tailor and do his usual procession around town in his ‘invisible clothes’. We found it very funny that he went along with it! During demonstration comprehension, we deepened our inference skills by focusing on 3 inference questions. This allowed us to further develop the skill of finding evidence in the text to support our own thinking.

Crew Hamill have really enjoyed this week’s book – The very dangerous dinosaur. We have lots of dinosaur fans in our reading group and they loved discovering the mischief that the dangerous dinosaur got up to. We spent the beginning of the week predicting what we thought might happen in the story based on a few pictures from the text and a brief introduction to the story. This allowed us to make notices and wonders about the story, using evidence from what we had read and seen to support our learning. We then unpicked some of the more difficult vocabulary in the story, allowing us to improve our fluency when echo reading, reading in pairs and reading independently. Following this, during our book talk question lesson, we were able to use Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills to accurately find the answers to questions about the story. Finally, we worked in mini crews to focus on inference questions within a demo comprehension lesson. We developed our skills from last week in which we found the key information in the question to find the key information in the text. This information gave us clues that enabled us to come up with a sensible answer to the questions, using the clue to support our ideas. We will then be able to apply these skills to our independent learning during our independent comprehension.