In our book talk lesson, we have been focusing on gaps from our previous assessments. As part of this, we’ve been using different formats so that we are familiar with different ways questions can be presented to us. We worked together as partners to come up with predictions but ensuring we linked this back to what we already know.
In history, we have been learning about where the cacao bean comes from and how it’s grown. We used QR codes to access some reading materials providing lots of information. We then had to use our skimming and scanning skills to help us locate the relevant information to answer questions.
We the looks at the differences between how the Maya processes cacao beans and how they’re processed now to keep up with the demand.
In our book talk session this week, we have continued to focus on inference. We have texted marked the next couple of pages in our book, highlighting any words we wasn’t sure of. We used skills such as read around the word and looking at the root word to unpick this vocabulary.
Today we began our next text about the Story of Noah and his ark.
We worked collaboratively to build arks just like Noah did. I wonder if ours will float?
In reading, we have been looking at Pig Heart Boy. In this session, we considered why mum and dad were arguing and which side of the debate we fell on. We then looked at how Dr. Bryce added to discussion and thought about the pros and cons of the procedure. This culminated with us having a conscience alley, to try and predict which side Cam would favour.
In our demo comp, we have been discussing the expectations when answering an inference question. This is a huge area for development for us this half term and we are starting to get the hang of answering these questions and ensuring we provide enough detail to answer the question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
