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!

Today, we continued to activate our inference skills by looking at a poem. We were introduced to the poem yesterday and worked hard to pull the text apart, identifying key vocabulary and labelling the text with key information and notes that we felt were helpful in our mission to understand poetry and what they poem was actually about. We then used these notes today to delve deeper into inferring the feelings of the characters. We began by working as a crew to identify the key points in the text for the first character, Chloe, and discussed how we thought she was feeling at each of these points. We used evidence from the text to support our ideas (E.g. she was happy at the beginning because she was looking out into space with open eyes). We then created a line graph to detail our findings. Following this, we worked in pairs to do the same for the second character, Max. Once we’d done this, we brought both graphs together to compare their feelings throughout the poem. We identified that Max was a much happier, more positive character, whilst Chloe was much less positive as she worried a lot and was scared by the idea of adventure.

After having a heavy focus on retrieval skills during Autumn 1, Crew Hamill have shifted their focus this half term and begun looking at inference skills – using clues from the text in order to provide an appropriate answer that is backed up with evidence from the text. To help us with this, we began by taking part in a hot seating activity in which we worked in mini crews to create questions that we would like to ask the main character of our story. One person then pretended to be this character and attempted to answer the questions, using what they knew from the text as support.

Following this, we then looked at some demonstration comprehension questions that we again focused on our inference skills. After working through how to answer this style of question with Miss Hamill on the board, we were given three questions of our own and three matching answers. We had to work in mini crews to match the question to it’s correct answer, using what we knew from the text to support us with this.

Crew Hamill have spent some time this week looking at some First News Newspapers. We really enjoyed having some reading for pleasure time and being able to flick through these at our own leisure.

On Friday, Crew Hamill were able to spend a little bit of time in the library! We loved being able to choose a book to read for pleasure and sitting with our friends to enjoy them.