In Crew Shields, Y3, Reading this morning we read a section of The Lion and the Unicorn and the completed our entry ticket. Our task was to draw the garden based upon what we read in the text. Our crew shared their drawings and we gave critique. We praised what we loved and how they could make them even better. Great HoWLs throughout today.
In reading, we’ve been focusing on text marking for vocabulary that we were unfamiliar with. We discussed the important of understanding the vocabulary we’re reading as this helps our understanding of the text. As part of this, we practiced reading around the word as this can support our understanding.
Yesterday morning, we visited the library so that children could select a book they could take home to read. We discussed the importance of reading the blurb to help pick books that math their interests.
On Tuesday, we were fortunate to have Time Travel Education come into school to learn about different aspects of World War 2. First, we were introduced to the beginning of the war and the key people: Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. We learnt about the air raids and the role of the wardens. Then we had to opportunity to help get rid of the fire bombs that had been dropped. This required teamwork to keep everyone safe.
Evacuation was our next area to learn about. The children got to learn about the upheaved to family life to ensure the safety of the children. They packed their bags and were given an insight into rationing. We had a shop keeper and some customers who came to spend their vouchers. We’ll build on this later in the case study.
In the last session, we learned about how the Wardens would deliver first aid and met Ernie (dummy) who had become trapped in a building that had been blown up. Once we seen how to treat a broken femur, we had the opportunity to treat our partner for the same condition.
In between the sessions in the hall, we had access to boxes of artefacts which came with reading materials to help us learn about each one.
Our favourite one was as craft that had a map printed on it. Aircrew would wear this so that if their plane went down they’d have a map on them to help navigate their way to safety.
During our book talk lesson, we have worked together to answer a range of questions. We focused on the importance of using the text to support us to answer the question. Some of our questions asked for evidence from the text and this was an area we will continue to develop as we more through this year. It was great to see the children working collaboratively and working to each other’s strengths.
Today we recapped the story so far by thinking about what the characters may be saying to each other and their thoughts. We worked in mini crews to think of our own ideas then shared these with the whole crew.
From here we unpicked the vocabulary that would appear in the text before text marking it when reading. We used an echo read, partner read then an independent read. We tried to think about the fluency of our reading today. Our reasons to read allowed us to show our understanding of the text which we all did really well. Our exit ticket allowed to order the events in the story. A great reading lesson in MI 🙂
This year, as a school, we have taken part in Chapter One.This has meant that many of our pupils in KS1 have had the opportunity to read 1:1 with a volunteer at least once a week for the whole year, that’s reading at least a whopping 40 times this year! Not only has this reading opportunity supported our pupils to develop their reading skills and better their fluency it has also boosted their love of reading! All of the pupils that have taken part in this have made fantastic progress with some now reaching the top book band level! We are super proud of them all! Yesterday, we got to take part in a live call with our Chapter One representative, as well as many of the volunteers that have been reading with our pupils. It was lovely for us all to put a face to people, as well as listen to the lovely feedback that our volunteers shared. It was such a lovely moment to share with our pupils, and the great news is there will be much more of this in the next academic year!
A HUGE shoutout to Luke and Zach who earned themselves a golden ticket in our reading challenge from this term. Each of them has read every single day at home to move up on our challenge board. They even started to overlap some of the other children in crew showing just how much they have read! I am so proud of your enthusiasm with this challenge boys and I praise your efforts in making sure you have read at home every night. I hope you love your prizes!
Our entry ticket allowed us to think back to our expeditionary learning and what Egyptians did for fun. We then used a partner read, echo read and an independent read to read the next part of the text. We unpicked the vocabulary as we read. Our reasons to read consolidated our understanding of the text and allowed some of our own opinions to be voiced. Our exit ticket allowed us to experiment with a range of the games and evaluate which ones we liked the best and why. We then worked on the speed of our reading, Mrs McClare timed us and we voiced how many words we had read in a minute.
We’ve really enjoyed our non-fiction focus in our reading lessons this week and have been able to dive deeper into the world of the Mayans by working on some retrieval and vocabulary questions based on the text we have been reading: What happened to the Maya? We’ve recapped the key skills needed to answer this question type and will apply these in our independent written comp.
