Book Talk and Demo Comp – The very dangerous dinosaur.

26th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have really enjoyed this week’s book – The very dangerous dinosaur. We have lots of dinosaur fans in our reading group and they loved discovering the mischief that the dangerous dinosaur got up to. We spent the beginning of the week predicting what we thought might happen in the story based on a few pictures from the text and a brief introduction to the story. This allowed us to make notices and wonders about the story, using evidence from what we had read and seen to support our learning. We then unpicked some of the more difficult vocabulary in the story, allowing us to improve our fluency when echo reading, reading in pairs and reading independently. Following this, during our book talk question lesson, we were able to use Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills to accurately find the answers to questions about the story. Finally, we worked in mini crews to focus on inference questions within a demo comprehension lesson. We developed our skills from last week in which we found the key information in the question to find the key information in the text. This information gave us clues that enabled us to come up with a sensible answer to the questions, using the clue to support our ideas. We will then be able to apply these skills to our independent learning during our independent comprehension.

New Reading Challenge! Who will earn a golden ticket?

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

“I’ve got a golden ticket!” – Who will be able to say these 5 magical words by the end of Summer Term?! Crew Hamill have been challenged again to read at home and this time, there will be FIVE winners! The first 5 to reach the golden tickets at the top of our challenge, by reading 30 times, will receive a special reward (that may or may not involve a chocolate baking treat). It’s been so lovely to see the engagement from the children already in this challenge! Lots of children’s names are moving up the oompa loompas and heading towards golden victory!

Book Talk and Demo Comp

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have enjoyed starting a new book in reading lessons this week – A celebration on Planet Zox. This book reintroduced us to some of our favourite characters from previous books we have read and then introduced us to some of their family. We loved being able to make links to our previous learning! We began by making predictions on what we thought the book might be about, thinking perhaps there was a birthday party due to the word “celebration” in the title. We then explored more of the complex vocabulary within the book, identify their definitions. Following this, we completed a book talk lesson in which we answered questions about the book, using Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills. For demo comp, we have moved away from retrieval as this was a huge focus for last half term and is something we are much stronger at now. We have begun to look at inference questions and learned all about identifying clues within the text in order to provide answers. We worked together to pull the questions apart and search through our books for the clues. Once we had identified these, we had a great discussion on what this information was able to tell us and how we could use it to provide a detailed answer. We can’t wait to use these skills tomorrow in our independent comprehension.

Book Talk

28th March 2024Laura Hamill

In Crew Hamill, we have shifted our focus from fiction to non-fiction and have started a new book called Vulture Culture. To begin the week, we made a list of things we noticed about the pictures that were within the book – the title page and front cover. We then used this information to make a prediction about what may be included within the book. We decided that because it was non-fiction, it would be full of facts and real life information about vultures. Once we had done this, we looked a little deeper and read the book introduction. This told us a little more about what to expect in the book and we chotted some ideas of what other information we would like to find out about vultures as we read the book. Following this, we looked at the main vocabulary within the book and identified the meaning of some of the tricker vocabulary we would come across. By doing all this, we were able to read the book fluently as we had already looked at the tricky vocabulary and knew how to say the words correctly. Finally, we have worked in pairs to complete Fastest Finger and Have a Think questions about the book.

Reading Challenge Winners

28th March 2024Laura Hamill

Now that we are at the end of another half term, it was time to reveal the winners of our reading challenge. Crew Hamill have worked really hard to move their polar bears across the ocean in order to get them to the safety of the ice berg. This half term, we had two winners:

  1. The person who read the most times at home – Luke Byram.
  2. The person who has shown the greatest improvement in their attitude to learning – Kyla Smith.

Both of our winners received a Herbie Hedgehog reward! Happy Easter 🙂

Book talk continues in MI

26th March 2024Stacey McClare

Today we continued and finished our lesson from yesterday where we continued reading about famous inventors. We used a read around the robin today along with a chorus read. We then looked at our reasons to read.

Our entry ticket for todays lesson allowed us to work on our inference skills where we explored a picture. We thought about the girl in the picture and how she was feeling. We thought about who the characters were and what was happening in the picture. We explored the setting then thought about what the characters may be saying. There was lots of great discussion and thoughts expressed 🙂 From here we recapped the vocabulary we had explored yesterday with another entry ticket reminding ourselves of word meaning. We then moved onto looking at some written questions and worked independently to do this.

Book talk in MI

25th March 2024Stacey McClare

Our entry ticket allowed us to think about the word inventor and what it means. We tried to think of any words that belong to this word family. We thought about the root word first and what it meant. Children thought about the word invent, inventing and invention. We shared our understanding of the word with the whole crew.

We then looked at some of the vocabulary that would appear in the text. Before we were introduced to the word class of each word, we discussed this with our partner. We also tried to put each word into context to help us gain a better understanding of what the words meant. As we read, we then text marked these words. We also tried to circle any other unfamiliar vocabulary and tried to think of one fact that we thought was really interesting. We placed an exclamation mark by this fact. We shared this with our partner then with the whole crew. Our reasons to read challenged our thinking 🙂 We even voiced our own opinions on the invention of the telephone.

Tomorrow we will continue with our book talk session where we will read about Josephine Garis Cochrane, the lady who invented the dishwasher!

Demo Comp – Dear Vampire 🧛

22nd March 2024Laura Hamill

Following our book talk for the first half of this week, we spent yesterday completing some demonstration comprehension questions. We watched as Miss Hamill explained how to identify key information within the question which we could then find in the text and read around in order to support us in finding an accurate and specific answer. We then worked in pairs to use these strategies to identify the answers to some further questions about the book.