In our reading lessons last week, we focused heavily on vocabulary and understanding this in context. This is a skill we’ve been working hard on throughout the year as we come across words we’re unfamiliar with in the text. This allows children to fully comprehend the text when we’re reading.
Last week, we finished our class read which is a book that is read to us by our crew leader. We have really enjoyed this book and the messages it gave us about friendship and believing in ourselves.
On Friday, Crew Hamill started their demo comp lesson by finding our vocabulary words from around the room and matching them to a sheet of definitions. We then worked as a crew to answer a guided demonstration question which was also focused on vocabulary. Following this, we used the skills we had learned in the guided question to work in pairs to answer two questions independently.
This week, Crew Hamill have continued their poetry focus by looking at a poem about Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. This helped us to compare and contrast her character to Augustus Gloop who we looked at last week. Our fluency focus this week has been on accuracy – ensuring we are following the text properly. We magpied some brilliant reading ideas from Crew Shields and Crew MI to help us with this. We learned how to use our rulers to move from line to line in the text, ensuring we didn’t miss any out which would impact on how fluently we read (thanks, Crew Shields!). We also accurately followed the individual words with our fingers which allowed us to keep up with where we were in the text (thanks, Crew MI!) After reading through the text several times, we have looked at answering questions with Miss Hamill and in Talk Partners. Our focus this week has been on vocabulary in order to prepare us for our assessments next week!
We loved tasting chapattis and playing games with them.
Today we recapped the text we read yesterday, thinking about the health care in Egyptian times compared to now. We remembered some of the reasons why Egyptians visited a doctor and how the care of the rich compared to the poor. We are really enjoying our new text as it has lots of humour in it! Next we looked at some of the new vocabulary that would appear as we read. We discussed word class along with definitions of each word. We text marked this vocabulary when we started reading. When reading, we took part in an echo read where we tried hard to use an expressive voice along with better fluency. We tried to stay at a pace that was similar to Mrs McClare. We discussed some of the language as we read and offered our thoughts and opinions on parts of the text. Some of which made us laugh! Mrs McClare questioned us on different things as we read. We then took part in a partner read, again offering some critique to our partner. Mrs McClare then read part of the text, modelling fluency and expression. She tried hard to ensure her voice changed when bold words appeared in the text. We enjoyed our reasons to read where we used the text to support our answers. Our exit ticket was looking at statements comparing treatments from today to Egyptian times. A productive session today MI 🙂
Today we were introduced to our new text, “so you think you’ve got it bad? A kids guide to life in Ancient Egypt.” First of all we took part in a silent conversation where we explored the front cover of the text. We then moved onto the blurb, reading it with our partner and discussing our ideas. We then moved onto looking at the features of non fiction, playing some fastest finger first games and voicing the sections we would like to read about based on the contents page. We then used read around the robin to explore the glossary and discussed some of the language with our mini crew and whole crew. We then took part in a partner 1 and partner 2 read where we read the first section of the text. We gave our partner critique after reading for a minute then swapped our role. We then took part in an independent read before listening to Mrs McClare read the text back to us. We explored our reasons to read, using the text to find the answers and adding our own opinions and thoughts. Our exit ticket looked at true and false statements which consolidated our learning.
Today we began our lesson by thinking about the school day. In pairs we ordered the events that happen in a typical school day such as reading, writing and maths. The children then added in important things like bagels and story time that Mrs Robson had forgotten about!
Afterwards we thought more carefully about the purpose of crew and what happens during our crew sessions as this will be the first section of our report.
In our reading lessons this week, we have continued to work on our inference skill but our text was a poem. We really enjoyed reading this poem, focusing on our fluency and pausing at punctuation. We read to our partners, played control the game, read independently and read to an adult. We also worked in pairs to answer our reasons to read.
