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.
This week we have been learning about Spring. We have been reading The Hungry Caterpillar 🐛 We have practised sequencing the story in our small groups, and made some lovely butterfly pictures!
In our book talk lessons this week, we have focussed on developing our inference skill. We first read the text and text marked anything we didn’t understand and things we found important. We made a class glossary of the words we had picked from the text. Then, we looked at answering some inference based questions whilst skimming and scanning the text.
In reading, we have been focusing more on inference style questions as this is an area that we need to develop. We have been unpacking the questions and thinking about the skills needed to answer these type of questions.
On Wednesday afternoon, Crew Hamill took a visit to our school library. We were able to browse a fantastic selection of books and choose one that we would like to take home to read for pleasure. We also spent some time reading with our friends.
We began today’s Book Talk session by completing an entry ticket to support us in developing our inference skills. We had to infer as much as possible from the picture given, it was tricky but with a few prompts from Mrs Elmer we were able to list lots! We then recapped the title, purpose, audience and genre of our current text and revisited the map (of Africa) that we had looked at in the previous session. We located Ethiopia and looked at the other countries that surrounded it. We soon realised that it was a ‘landlocked’ country. We then made predictions using the picture clues on the map to predict what we thought Ethiopia might be like. We then ‘echo read’ the text and everyone had a go at independently reading a sentence or two using the ‘round robin’ reading approach. As we read we discussed some of the new, more challenging, topic related words that we came across such as Rastafarians, murals and seized. We then looked at some reason to read questions that required us to ‘trawl for evidence’ in the text. 🕵 At the end of the lesson we then completed an ‘exit ticket’ to share some of the interesting facts that we had learnt about Ethiopia, such as did you know that they started the habit of drinking coffee?! ☕
