We’ve really enjoyed our non-fiction focus in our reading lessons this week and have been able to dive deeper into the world of the Mayans by working on some retrieval and vocabulary questions based on the text we have been reading: What happened to the Maya? We’ve recapped the key skills needed to answer this question type and will apply these in our independent written comp.

This week, Crew Hamill have begun to focus on non-fiction texts in our reading session. We focused on a double page spread from an information book all about the Mayans which links to our expedition. We began by discussion how we knew what this text was going to be about, drawing attention to the title of the double page spread: What happened to the Maya? We then continued with our focus of reading for accuracy and have used our rulers to guide our eyes as to the line we are reading and our fingers to guide to each word. We have practiced reading aloud as well as reading in our heads. Additionally, we have used our text marking skills to identify key vocabulary, key information and things that we find interesting, surprising or a connection to. We tested our recall of the vocabulary we identified by walking around the room and matching our vocabulary words to their definitions. We found some of these a bit tricky but were able to complete this successfully. We have also answered some vocabulary and retrieval questions with our talk partners to delve a little deeper into what we have read.

On Friday, Crew Hamill started their demo comp lesson by finding our vocabulary words from around the room and matching them to a sheet of definitions. We then worked as a crew to answer a guided demonstration question which was also focused on vocabulary. Following this, we used the skills we had learned in the guided question to work in pairs to answer two questions independently.

This week, Crew Hamill have continued their poetry focus by looking at a poem about Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. This helped us to compare and contrast her character to Augustus Gloop who we looked at last week. Our fluency focus this week has been on accuracy – ensuring we are following the text properly. We magpied some brilliant reading ideas from Crew Shields and Crew MI to help us with this. We learned how to use our rulers to move from line to line in the text, ensuring we didn’t miss any out which would impact on how fluently we read (thanks, Crew Shields!). We also accurately followed the individual words with our fingers which allowed us to keep up with where we were in the text (thanks, Crew MI!) After reading through the text several times, we have looked at answering questions with Miss Hamill and in Talk Partners. Our focus this week has been on vocabulary in order to prepare us for our assessments next week!