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.
Category : Reading in Action
Book Talk
Crew Hamill have LOVED reading this week and it has been so good to see their positive attitudes and active participation during reading. We began by looking at a book that is linked to our current expedition: Black and British. We looked at the cover of the book, as well as the blurb, and had an excellent discussion on what we thought the book might be about, what genre it was and what the purpose of it was. We were excited to learn that it contained lots of real life stories about Black people in Britain and how this had changed the world we live in today. Following this, we focused on one of the stories – Black Americans in Britain – and learned all about 4 amazing Americans who have come to Britain and influenced life for the better. Our favourite was Henry ‘Box’ Brown who mailed himself in a small, wooden box in order to escape slavery! We have worked really hard this week on our automaticity in reading which has tested our ability to read words automatically, without the need for sounding out. We have also focused on our words per minute and have challenged ourselves to hit the Year 6 target of 185 words per minute! Finally, we were split into two groups – one working with Miss Hamill and the other working independently in pairs – to answer some retrieval questions about the book. Miss Hamill was really impressed at our ability to do this accurately!





Exploring vocabulary in reading
Today we really focussed on some of the vocabulary in our text. We looked at synonyms, finding and copying a word that means the same. We have become much more confident with this skill. Again we used a range of strategies to read the text, some of these being echo read, partner reading and independent reading. When reading with our partner, we focussed again on fluency and expression, giving a praise and wonder after our partner had read. We also tried to use the punctuation a little better when reading. Our reasons to read focussed more on our inference skills and we used APE to support our thoughts and answers.






Text marking in MI
When reading our text today, we had 3 things to focus on when text marking. We used and recorded the symbols well then shared our thoughts and ideas in mini crews and with the whole crew. We are getting much more confident with text marking 🙂



Activate in reading
We are doing lots of reading fluency in our reading lessons. We are continuing to work on our words per minute where we use timers daily to practise. We then answer 3 questions based on gaps from our Autumn assessments and daily written comprehension. We are already showing improvements.


Reading in MI
Our activate today really worked on our fluency and words per minute, something we are really working on this term.


The next part of our activate allowed us to explore a picture, we thought about what the character was doing, who she was, why she was doing what she was doing, what was happening and how she could be feeling! We were then introduced to the title of the story! We took part in a silent conversation using the lenses to answer questions. From here we explored the blurb which we all found very funny!! Again we worked on our fluency skills, taking part in both independent and partner reads. We then explored some of the language in the text and played four corners to assess our understanding. We can’t wait to start reading the story tomorrow 🙂



KS1 Chapter One Meet and Greet



The children in KS1 were lucky enough to meet their volunteers that they read with on the laptop each week.
The children spoke to their volunteers and even told some jokes!
Christmas reading in MI
In reading we have started our Christmas reading lessons. All our do now activities involve a quick read which are Christmas related. We are working on our words per minute before answering questions relating to the text. The main part of our reading lesson links to a Christmas advert 🙂 We loved watching the first one today. We then looked at a series of questions together which we unpicked in mini crews and then as a whole crew.







Reading in MI
This week we have used a video clip for our reading lessons which has allowed us to develop our inference skills! We have LOVED the clip and have been excited every day to watch the next part. On Wednesday we ordered pictures from the parts of the clip we had read so far and explained each part to our partner and in small mini crews. We then watched small parts of the clip and carried out our reasons to read. There were so many different discussions and ideas on each part of the clip. Children’s ideas were just amazing 🙂








Book Talk – Day One





To hook us into our new story for reading we worked collaboratively to piece the front cover together.
We made predictions about what we thought would happen and even found out our own elf names!