Today for our experience lesson we thought about how the leaves danced past the window of the high tower. We made our own leaf and then took them outside to see how they moved in the wind.
Then we looked again at the book and saw that the children packed sandwiches for their adventures so we did the same!
Today we started our new book in writing called “Our Tower”, the book started with a girl who was walking through a tall, grey and dingy city. She did not feel very happy and it was raining so she was soaked!
We experienced the miserable weather and built our own skyscrapers for our own city. We especially worked on our adjectives in todays lesson to help us to describe what we could see.
In Crew Hamill, we have shifted our focus from fiction to non-fiction and have started a new book called Vulture Culture. To begin the week, we made a list of things we noticed about the pictures that were within the book – the title page and front cover. We then used this information to make a prediction about what may be included within the book. We decided that because it was non-fiction, it would be full of facts and real life information about vultures. Once we had done this, we looked a little deeper and read the book introduction. This told us a little more about what to expect in the book and we chotted some ideas of what other information we would like to find out about vultures as we read the book. Following this, we looked at the main vocabulary within the book and identified the meaning of some of the tricker vocabulary we would come across. By doing all this, we were able to read the book fluently as we had already looked at the tricky vocabulary and knew how to say the words correctly. Finally, we have worked in pairs to complete Fastest Finger and Have a Think questions about the book.
Now that we are at the end of another half term, it was time to reveal the winners of our reading challenge. Crew Hamill have worked really hard to move their polar bears across the ocean in order to get them to the safety of the ice berg. This half term, we had two winners:
Both of our winners received a Herbie Hedgehog reward! Happy Easter 🙂
Following our book talk for the first half of this week, we spent yesterday completing some demonstration comprehension questions. We watched as Miss Hamill explained how to identify key information within the question which we could then find in the text and read around in order to support us in finding an accurate and specific answer. We then worked in pairs to use these strategies to identify the answers to some further questions about the book.
This week, we focused on our new book – Dear Vampire. We have spent a lot of time making ourselves familiar with the vocabulary within the book to ensure we can read fluently. We made initial predictions on what we thought the story might be about before we read the introduction which gave us a sneak peek. Following this, we predicted what we thought would happen next and were interested to have our first read to see if we were correct. We have delved deep into what the story is actually about within our book talk lessons and answered some retrieval questions using Fastest Finger and some inference questions that have made us think!
Today we thought about Tom’s Journey to the Arctic. We made origami paper boats and then sailed them across the frozen water in our tough tray. We talked about what Tom would see on his journey and the effects big and small waves would have on his boat. We also talked about the vastness of the ocean and how he might feel lonely on his adventure. Great work crew, I am looking forward to reading your writing!
In our book talk session this morning, we started a new book “Polar Bear”. We began by unpicking the front cover and deciding whether it is a fiction or a non-fiction book. We the chorus read the text while we text marked anything that was important or what we didn’t know/understand. We found lots of important facts in the pages we were reading.
Today, we completed our book talk lessons which consisted of us unpicking the text and ensuring we understand the vocabulary we’re reading. We had some good discussions about the vocabulary and used different skills to help us understand the meaning and context of the words.
