In reading yesterday, we focused on our reading fluency and reading with expression. Miss Shields did an echo read to model how to read with expression then the children worked in small groups to work on a small section together. They had some time to practice before performing to the rest of the class. I was very impressed with how quickly they picked it up.
Category : Reading
Reading Unseen Text.
In our reading lesson today, we tackled reading an unseen text and used some important reading strategies ( skimming and scanning, highlighting key information, vocabulary and context clues, making inferences and summarising what we have read ), to help us answer the questions.
Be the teacher
In reading this week, the children had the opportunity to be the teacher. They were provided with some inference questions that had been answered. They worked in pairs to evaluate which questions or questions they thought had been answered well. Children were able to start pulling out that they preferred a particular answer because it give an explanation that linked to the question. They could see that in other answers it either didn’t provide enough information or it was a lot of writing but didn’t actually answer the question.
Reasons To Read.
Today, we lead our own learning in Crew Wilkinson. We used the text, (Malala Yousafzai: A Voice for Education)to create 3 Reasons To Read questions for our partner to answer. We used our skimming and scanning skills to help us create our questions.
Book Talk and Increasing Fluency
This week, we have been focusing on a new book by Marcus Rashford called “You Can Do It”. We started the week by looking at the front cover and the blurb and pulling apart as much information as we could from what we could see and read. This helped us to understand a little bit more about what the book was about before we began to read any of it. Lots of us thought it might be a book about football due to the fact he is such a famous footballer. However, after reading the blurb, we were surprised to discover that it is actually about injustice and the injustices he has experienced first hand. Following this, we have pulled out a summary section on the first chapter and identified tricky vocabulary, making sure we can read all of these words and understand what they mean to support with our fluency. We also looked at our automaticity words and challenged a partner to read these automatically in a random order. We have then taken part in echo reading alongside our teacher and had another go at our words per minute challenge to see how close we are to the year 6 expected standard of 185 words per minute.
Demonstration Comprehension
Crew Hamill have worked really hard this week on their comprehension skills. We have worked as a crew to remind ourselves the skills needed to solve vocabulary and fact and retrieval questions. Once we’d done this, we worked in pairs to solve some questions of our own.
Automaticity
In reading yesterday, we started off by recapping our automaticity words. These are words we’ve been learning to read by sight. Children threw the ball to each other and had to read the word that was closet to their right thumb.
How do we group animals?
In our expedition lesson (science), we have been learning about grouping animals. We learned (through some reading) that the scientific word for this is taxonomy and that the reason we do this is because we like things to be organised and orderly.
We discussed some ways that animals could be grouped and looked at some examples. Children then had an opportunity to group some animals using a Venn diagram. After this, they were given a larger group of animals where they worked in pairs to decide how they could be grouped. Children were able to show a good understanding of how they could be grouped differently and it was great to see them using language such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammals, warm blooded or cold blooded. We’re now ready to move on to classification.
Reading Fluency
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.
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!
