To hook us into our new book we made a jigsaw from the front cover and made predictions about what might happen in the book.
We then practiced our cutting skills again and chopped some tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and onion to make some tasty gazpacho following a recipe from the back of the book.
Crew Hamill have focused on a newspaper article about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in our reading lessons this week. We have had lots of opportunities to practice our fluency using various strategies including chunk, chunk, scoop and chorus reading. This has allowed us to work on our words per minute and we have also discussed our intonation when reading, ensuring we do not sound monotonous and boring! We have also practiced our automaticity words each day. We enjoyed today’s activity in which we created our own spinners using a pencil and paper clip! Following this, we have worked in pairs to solve reason to read questions and demonstration comprehension questions.
This week in reading, we have been looking at the poem titled “Together We Grow.”
Today, the children performed the poem. Some children recited their verse’s with quiet contemplation, while others brought their lines to life with bold gestures.
Together, they created a beautiful mosaic of voices that truly captured the essence of the poem.
What an amazing treat from Mrs Atherton for the children who have made the most improvements with reading over this half term, including those who have done lots of reading at home!
This week, Crew Hamill have looked in depth at their written comprehension answers, pulling apart the questions and identifying the steps needed in order to answer them correctly. We have identified as a crew that we are much stronger at answering comprehension questions on texts that we are familiar with so we have been challenged over the last two weeks to complete our written comprehensions on unseen texts. These have been much trickier as we have no awareness of the text before we answer questions on it, similar to how it will be in our SATs and assessments. We worked as a crew to discuss how we identify question types from the wording of the question and then how we use the information within the question to find the answer in the text. For any questions we got wrong, we purple penned our answers.
In reading yesterday, we focused on our reading fluency and reading with expression. Miss Shields did an echo read to model how to read with expression then the children worked in small groups to work on a small section together. They had some time to practice before performing to the rest of the class. I was very impressed with how quickly they picked it up.
In our reading lesson today, we tackled reading an unseen text and used some important reading strategies ( skimming and scanning, highlighting key information, vocabulary and context clues, making inferences and summarising what we have read ), to help us answer the questions.
In reading this week, the children had the opportunity to be the teacher. They were provided with some inference questions that had been answered. They worked in pairs to evaluate which questions or questions they thought had been answered well. Children were able to start pulling out that they preferred a particular answer because it give an explanation that linked to the question. They could see that in other answers it either didn’t provide enough information or it was a lot of writing but didn’t actually answer the question.
After our flash cards and vocabulary check, we started to think more about inference. We started with a picture to activate our minds then we unpicked some of the written comprehension questions we completed on Friday. We really explored the questions thinking about our answers and if we had answered the questions accurately. We worked well in mini crews when unpicking the question and finding evidence in the text we had read.
Today, we lead our own learning in Crew Wilkinson. We used the text, (Malala Yousafzai: A Voice for Education)to create 3 Reasons To Read questions for our partner to answer. We used our skimming and scanning skills to help us create our questions.
