World War 2 visitor

6th September 2024Ruth Shields

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.

Reasons to read

3rd September 2024Ruth Shields

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.

Book talk continues in MI

2nd September 2024Stacey McClare

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 🙂

Silent Conversation

30th August 2024Ruth Shields

This week, we started looking at our new reading test linked to our expedition ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’.

We started off by discussing the front cover and what we could notice while ensuring we know the purpose, audience and genre of our text. We did this using a silent conversation where we had some questions to answer. However, before we started we ensured that we understood the expectations when moving around the room to keep each other safe.

Chapter One Celebrations!

19th July 2024Sophie Elmer

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!

Reading Challenge Golden Ticket Winners

18th July 2024Laura Hamill

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!

Book talk in MI

8th July 2024Stacey McClare

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.

Demo Comp – Non-Fiction

5th July 2024Laura Hamill

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.

Book Talk – Non-Fiction

28th June 2024Laura Hamill

This week, Crew Hamill have begun to focus on non-fiction texts in our reading session. We focused on a double page spread from an information book all about the Mayans which links to our expedition. We began by discussion how we knew what this text was going to be about, drawing attention to the title of the double page spread: What happened to the Maya? We then continued with our focus of reading for accuracy and have used our rulers to guide our eyes as to the line we are reading and our fingers to guide to each word. We have practiced reading aloud as well as reading in our heads. Additionally, we have used our text marking skills to identify key vocabulary, key information and things that we find interesting, surprising or a connection to. We tested our recall of the vocabulary we identified by walking around the room and matching our vocabulary words to their definitions. We found some of these a bit tricky but were able to complete this successfully. We have also answered some vocabulary and retrieval questions with our talk partners to delve a little deeper into what we have read.