Last week, we finished our class read which is a book that is read to us by our crew leader. We have really enjoyed this book and the messages it gave us about friendship and believing in ourselves.
Class Read – The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart
Category : Reading
Veruca Poem – Demonstration Comprehension
On Friday, Crew Hamill started their demo comp lesson by finding our vocabulary words from around the room and matching them to a sheet of definitions. We then worked as a crew to answer a guided demonstration question which was also focused on vocabulary. Following this, we used the skills we had learned in the guided question to work in pairs to answer two questions independently.
Violet Beauregarde Book Talk
This week, Crew Hamill have continued their poetry focus by looking at a poem about Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. This helped us to compare and contrast her character to Augustus Gloop who we looked at last week. Our fluency focus this week has been on accuracy – ensuring we are following the text properly. We magpied some brilliant reading ideas from Crew Shields and Crew MI to help us with this. We learned how to use our rulers to move from line to line in the text, ensuring we didn’t miss any out which would impact on how fluently we read (thanks, Crew Shields!). We also accurately followed the individual words with our fingers which allowed us to keep up with where we were in the text (thanks, Crew MI!) After reading through the text several times, we have looked at answering questions with Miss Hamill and in Talk Partners. Our focus this week has been on vocabulary in order to prepare us for our assessments next week!
Book talk continues in MI
Today we recapped the text we read yesterday, thinking about the health care in Egyptian times compared to now. We remembered some of the reasons why Egyptians visited a doctor and how the care of the rich compared to the poor. We are really enjoying our new text as it has lots of humour in it! Next we looked at some of the new vocabulary that would appear as we read. We discussed word class along with definitions of each word. We text marked this vocabulary when we started reading. When reading, we took part in an echo read where we tried hard to use an expressive voice along with better fluency. We tried to stay at a pace that was similar to Mrs McClare. We discussed some of the language as we read and offered our thoughts and opinions on parts of the text. Some of which made us laugh! Mrs McClare questioned us on different things as we read. We then took part in a partner read, again offering some critique to our partner. Mrs McClare then read part of the text, modelling fluency and expression. She tried hard to ensure her voice changed when bold words appeared in the text. We enjoyed our reasons to read where we used the text to support our answers. Our exit ticket was looking at statements comparing treatments from today to Egyptian times. A productive session today MI 🙂
Book talk in MI
Today we were introduced to our new text, “so you think you’ve got it bad? A kids guide to life in Ancient Egypt.” First of all we took part in a silent conversation where we explored the front cover of the text. We then moved onto the blurb, reading it with our partner and discussing our ideas. We then moved onto looking at the features of non fiction, playing some fastest finger first games and voicing the sections we would like to read about based on the contents page. We then used read around the robin to explore the glossary and discussed some of the language with our mini crew and whole crew. We then took part in a partner 1 and partner 2 read where we read the first section of the text. We gave our partner critique after reading for a minute then swapped our role. We then took part in an independent read before listening to Mrs McClare read the text back to us. We explored our reasons to read, using the text to find the answers and adding our own opinions and thoughts. Our exit ticket looked at true and false statements which consolidated our learning.
Poetry – Book Talk
Over the last two weeks, Crew Hamill has focused on poetry for their reading lessons. We have looked at two poems that are linked to our expedition learning – Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen and the Augustus Gloop song from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. We have done a lot of discussion on what a poem is and identified the different features. We have then had a heavy focus on inference, really testing our skills of pulling information out of a text and using clues within it to answer questions about thoughts and feelings. We have then worked in pairs to answer inference questions about the characters. We cannot wait to apply these skills to our demonstration comprehension questions and written comprehension next week.
Book Talk – ABC
In book talk this week, we have honed back in on our inference skills and how to ensure we are answering the questions with enough detail. We have focused on ensuring that we are reading around the text but also checking back to the question so we can ensure we are selecting the right information. In addition, we’ve also had a focus on vocabulary and how we need to understand the words we’re reading as this will help our comprehension of the text.
Our do now activities, have given us the opportunities to use our inference skills on not only images but also text which is the one we find a little tricky. We were able to give some good reasoning for our inference. We started using a new strategy where we either agree, build on or challenge (ABC) someone’s answer but ensuring we are doing this in a respectful manner.
Book talk in MI
Our entry ticket allowed us to develop our inference skills around a picture which certainly raised lots of questions and discussions. We then worked on our words per minute by reading our text again! We really tried to ensure we were being fluent but also taking in what we were reading. We then took part in an echo read, read around the robin and an independent read where we recapped the text and some of the language in it. From here we looked at our reasons to read before acting out parts of the poem! Our exit ticket assessed our understanding of the stanzas in the poem! A great reading lesson MI 🙂
Book Talk – Poetry
This week, Crew Hamill have started something new in reading – poetry! We have looked at the famous poem by Michael Rosen: I love chocolate cake. We have started with an extract of this poem that details his love of chocolate cake as a result of having chocolate cake for tea as a little boy. He talks about a time he had chocolate cake for tea and then crept downstairs for leftovers without wanting to be caught by his mum and dad. We can’t wait to read the next extract to see if he gets away with it or not! We began by text marking the poem, highlighting key vocabulary, interesting parts and things we loved or thought were important. After this, we used our inference and retrieval skills to answer a number of questions about what had happened in the extract. We have also had several opportunities to read aloud, focusing on pausing and pace. Today, we also watched Michael Rosen himself re-telling his poem and made notices about his expression, both in his voice and in his face. We then used this to perform part of the poems ourself!
Book Talk – predictions
Our do now activity was a prediction about where we thought the tunnel led. We discussed the importance of giving full answers using because to explain why we thought that.
One of our predictions was thinking the bunny was about to enter Easter Egg Island which is a direct link to our current reading text about chocolate. We also had predictions about the bunny going to a fair because these are happy and bright places.
Once we’d given our predictions, we discussed how this could link to emotions and how currently the bunny is feeling upset but something is happening that will start to change his mood.
Our fluency focus was pausing and we are becoming more confident with pausing in the correct places to help our comprehension.
Finally, we went through the text and highlighted any vocabulary that we were unfamiliar with and text marked the definition.
