Book Talk and Increasing Fluency

This week, we have been focusing on a new book by Marcus Rashford called “You Can Do It”. We started the week by looking at the front cover and the blurb and pulling apart as much information as we could from what we could see and read. This helped us to understand a little bit more about what the book was about before we began to read any of it. Lots of us thought it might be a book about football due to the fact he is such a famous footballer. However, after reading the blurb, we were surprised to discover that it is actually about injustice and the injustices he has experienced first hand. Following this, we have pulled out a summary section on the first chapter and identified tricky vocabulary, making sure we can read all of these words and understand what they mean to support with our fluency. We also looked at our automaticity words and challenged a partner to read these automatically in a random order. We have then taken part in echo reading alongside our teacher and had another go at our words per minute challenge to see how close we are to the year 6 expected standard of 185 words per minute.

Reading in MI

Today we started a new reading text all about our muscles which links nicely to our expedition. We focussed lots on the language being used in the text, really unpicking vocabulary then using the words to make sense of what we were reading. We then focussed on reading the text fluently where we took part in an echo read and scoop and an independent read. Our reasons to read allowed us to explore the text further, really using the text to skim and scan for answers. Our exit ticket really assessed our understanding of the vocabulary. A great lesson MI 🙂

National Story Telling Week

This morning in Crew, we explored the importance of storytelling and how it helps develop our creativity, imagination, and brings the magic of words to life!

Ms. White shared her love for reading real-life texts that she can truly immerse herself in. Sharni-Mae agreed and mentioned she is currently reading a book about a young boy who lost his father in an airplane crash. From this, we decided to look at First News to see what interesting facts we could find, which might inspire stories. Mason found some information with regards to homelessness and Declan found that dogs can smell when we are unwell! Both would make a great fiction story!

Reading in MI

Today we used the text well to find answers in our reading lesson. We used our skimming and scanning skills along with APE to answer questions in our reasons to read. We worked well with our partner searching for clues and backing up our answers with evidence from the text. Our exit ticket allowed us to order events from the story.

How do we group animals?

In our expedition lesson (science), we have been learning about grouping animals. We learned (through some reading) that the scientific word for this is taxonomy and that the reason we do this is because we like things to be organised and orderly.

We discussed some ways that animals could be grouped and looked at some examples. Children then had an opportunity to group some animals using a Venn diagram. After this, they were given a larger group of animals where they worked in pairs to decide how they could be grouped. Children were able to show a good understanding of how they could be grouped differently and it was great to see them using language such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammals, warm blooded or cold blooded. We’re now ready to move on to classification.

Reading Fluency

In reading we have been having a huge focus of prosody(fluency) and ensuring that we are reading a text how it should be read. This has involved lots of echo reading and time to practice reading before answering some questions about the text. It has been great to see some children having the confidence to stand up when it’s their turn to perform. We have also introduced feedback focused on the positives and what we enjoyed from the group reading.