Mayan Hierarchy

3rd May 2024Ruth Shields

As with our society, the Mayans had a hierarchy that consisted of The King or High Priest followed by the council (priesthood). Next there were the nobles who were the wealthiest and most powerful. This was followed by the merchants and Artisans who were known as commoners but they didn’t have as hard a life and had better jobs. Finally there were the commoners who were the lowest class and had no rights. They were also referred to as slaves.

We compared this with the hierarchy that we have in the country, our homes and even in school.

As with our previous lesson, we were able to do some additional reading because we had to get our information to help us understand each social class.

What were the Mayans known for?

3rd May 2024Ruth Shields

This week we have been exploring the Mayans and learning about what they were known for. This was a perfect opportunity to do some additional reading as we had lots of information to read so we could highlight the key information.

Once we had collected our information, we started to create posters that shared these facts.

We were surprised to learn that the Mayans had an 18 month calendar and they had various gods who were responsible for a range of things such as war, sun and rain.

Book Talk and Fluency

3rd May 2024Ruth Shields

In our book talk session, we’ve been focusing heavily on how to answer inference questions and thinking about the skills we’ll be using to help us do this. As part of the lesson, we have are able to see a guided question and see the model of what an answer should look like before working alongside our peers to answer a different question.

In addition, we have been focusing on our fluency and the importance how being fluent helps us to understand the text and therefore answer the questions. We have been working on our pausing, pace and accuracy which is something we’ll continue with in th coming weeks.

Book Talk and Demo Comp – The Invisible Clothes

3rd May 2024Laura Hamill

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.

It’s all about the view…

29th April 2024Lauren Marsh

Today we finished our book of “Our Tower” the children met a man in the tree who gifted them a stone with a hole in it, the stone gave them a different view of the world. Once leaving the magical inside of the tree the children decided to use this to view their city. This now looked completely different through their viewpoint – the once grey and dull city no longer looked dull and boring but now looked fun with people having picnics and playing, the sun was shining and everyone was having fun.

It left us thinking that if you change your view on something it might not be as bad as it seems.

Book Talk

28th April 2024Ruth Shields

In our book talk session, we have started looking at some of the elements that make us a fluent reading. Our focus for this lesson was ensuring we pause in the correct places. We discussed the importance of paying in the correct places which helps us with comprehension of the text. We used echo read which allowed us to see where we should pause. Each lesson we will focus on a different element of fluency which will support us as readers.

Book Talk and Demo Comp – The very dangerous dinosaur.

26th April 2024Laura Hamill

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.