As part of work towards Gold Dyslexia Friendly Schools status, P7Mc along with the rest of the school undertook a variety of learning activities that didn’t require any writing implements. We continued to use the Active Spelling strategies we have already blogged about. We also worked in pairs to solve Tarsia Puzzles about simplifying fractions. We did this in pairs, discussing what we already knew and working together to solve the jigsaw. In the afternoon we painted our own versions of the Great Wave off Kanagawa. We weren’t allowed to sketch any of it out first and had to go straight in with paint. We are all quite pleased with our results.
As part of our Literacy work, P7Mc have been working at improving their skills for working out what new words mean (metalinguistics) when reading new texts. We are finding that we can use different strategies such as reading on and back, partner or teacher discussions, replacing new words with words we already know and think may mean the same, then checking if it changes the meaning of the sentence. We now only check the meaning in a dictionary as a last resort. We are currently doing this in pairs as we build up our confidence to doing it independently. We are finding this strategy really useful as we read lots of different entries from Anne Frank’s diary as part of out topic work 
