Crew Hamill have worked really hard this week on their comprehension skills. We have worked as a crew to remind ourselves the skills needed to solve vocabulary and fact and retrieval questions. Once we’d done this, we worked in pairs to solve some questions of our own.
In reading yesterday, we started off by recapping our automaticity words. These are words we’ve been learning to read by sight. Children threw the ball to each other and had to read the word that was closet to their right thumb.
Today we used the text well to find answers in our reading lesson. We used our skimming and scanning skills along with APE to answer questions in our reasons to read. We worked well with our partner searching for clues and backing up our answers with evidence from the text. Our exit ticket allowed us to order events from the story.
In our expedition lesson (science), we have been learning about grouping animals. We learned (through some reading) that the scientific word for this is taxonomy and that the reason we do this is because we like things to be organised and orderly.
We discussed some ways that animals could be grouped and looked at some examples. Children then had an opportunity to group some animals using a Venn diagram. After this, they were given a larger group of animals where they worked in pairs to decide how they could be grouped. Children were able to show a good understanding of how they could be grouped differently and it was great to see them using language such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammals, warm blooded or cold blooded. We’re now ready to move on to classification.
In reading we have been having a huge focus of prosody(fluency) and ensuring that we are reading a text how it should be read. This has involved lots of echo reading and time to practice reading before answering some questions about the text. It has been great to see some children having the confidence to stand up when it’s their turn to perform. We have also introduced feedback focused on the positives and what we enjoyed from the group reading.
Crew Hamill have LOVED reading this week and it has been so good to see their positive attitudes and active participation during reading. We began by looking at a book that is linked to our current expedition: Black and British. We looked at the cover of the book, as well as the blurb, and had an excellent discussion on what we thought the book might be about, what genre it was and what the purpose of it was. We were excited to learn that it contained lots of real life stories about Black people in Britain and how this had changed the world we live in today. Following this, we focused on one of the stories – Black Americans in Britain – and learned all about 4 amazing Americans who have come to Britain and influenced life for the better. Our favourite was Henry ‘Box’ Brown who mailed himself in a small, wooden box in order to escape slavery! We have worked really hard this week on our automaticity in reading which has tested our ability to read words automatically, without the need for sounding out. We have also focused on our words per minute and have challenged ourselves to hit the Year 6 target of 185 words per minute! Finally, we were split into two groups – one working with Miss Hamill and the other working independently in pairs – to answer some retrieval questions about the book. Miss Hamill was really impressed at our ability to do this accurately!
Today we really focussed on some of the vocabulary in our text. We looked at synonyms, finding and copying a word that means the same. We have become much more confident with this skill. Again we used a range of strategies to read the text, some of these being echo read, partner reading and independent reading. When reading with our partner, we focussed again on fluency and expression, giving a praise and wonder after our partner had read. We also tried to use the punctuation a little better when reading. Our reasons to read focussed more on our inference skills and we used APE to support our thoughts and answers.
When reading our text today, we had 3 things to focus on when text marking. We used and recorded the symbols well then shared our thoughts and ideas in mini crews and with the whole crew. We are getting much more confident with text marking 🙂
We are doing lots of reading fluency in our reading lessons. We are continuing to work on our words per minute where we use timers daily to practise. We then answer 3 questions based on gaps from our Autumn assessments and daily written comprehension. We are already showing improvements.
Our activate today really worked on our fluency and words per minute, something we are really working on this term.
The next part of our activate allowed us to explore a picture, we thought about what the character was doing, who she was, why she was doing what she was doing, what was happening and how she could be feeling! We were then introduced to the title of the story! We took part in a silent conversation using the lenses to answer questions. From here we explored the blurb which we all found very funny!! Again we worked on our fluency skills, taking part in both independent and partner reads. We then explored some of the language in the text and played four corners to assess our understanding. We can’t wait to start reading the story tomorrow 🙂
