This morning, we looked at the front cover of our new story for Case Study 1 – Why is the seaside a special place? We started by saying what we noticed using the picture on the front cover and the title of the story to help us. Here’s what we came up with…
After reading the story, we talked about how the children felt at each point in the book. We used lots of new vocabulary such as, excited, joyful and giddy to describe how the children were feeling. We can’t wait to find out more about the seaside!
“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!
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.
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.
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:
The person who read the most times at home – Luke Byram.
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 🙂
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.
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!
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.
This week, we focused on our new book – Dear Vampire. We have spent a lot of time making ourselves familiar with the vocabulary within the book to ensure we can read fluently. We made initial predictions on what we thought the story might be about before we read the introduction which gave us a sneak peek. Following this, we predicted what we thought would happen next and were interested to have our first read to see if we were correct. We have delved deep into what the story is actually about within our book talk lessons and answered some retrieval questions using Fastest Finger and some inference questions that have made us think!
Today, we completed our book talk lessons which consisted of us unpicking the text and ensuring we understand the vocabulary we’re reading. We had some good discussions about the vocabulary and used different skills to help us understand the meaning and context of the words.
