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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today was Written Day where Crew Wilkinson delved deep into the text answering a variety of retrieval, inference and prediction questions about our current text. We then went through our answers as a crew and developed our answers, listening and supporting each other to achieve! What are you reading at home at the moment?
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.
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!
Today, we continued to activate our inference skills by looking at a poem. We were introduced to the poem yesterday and worked hard to pull the text apart, identifying key vocabulary and labelling the text with key information and notes that we felt were helpful in our mission to understand poetry and what they poem was actually about. We then used these notes today to delve deeper into inferring the feelings of the characters. We began by working as a crew to identify the key points in the text for the first character, Chloe, and discussed how we thought she was feeling at each of these points. We used evidence from the text to support our ideas (E.g. she was happy at the beginning because she was looking out into space with open eyes). We then created a line graph to detail our findings. Following this, we worked in pairs to do the same for the second character, Max. Once we’d done this, we brought both graphs together to compare their feelings throughout the poem. We identified that Max was a much happier, more positive character, whilst Chloe was much less positive as she worried a lot and was scared by the idea of adventure.
After having a heavy focus on retrieval skills during Autumn 1, Crew Hamill have shifted their focus this half term and begun looking at inference skills – using clues from the text in order to provide an appropriate answer that is backed up with evidence from the text. To help us with this, we began by taking part in a hot seating activity in which we worked in mini crews to create questions that we would like to ask the main character of our story. One person then pretended to be this character and attempted to answer the questions, using what they knew from the text as support.
Following this, we then looked at some demonstration comprehension questions that we again focused on our inference skills. After working through how to answer this style of question with Miss Hamill on the board, we were given three questions of our own and three matching answers. We had to work in mini crews to match the question to it’s correct answer, using what we knew from the text to support us with this.
