Category: Literacy

This mornings reading skill is character analysis. A few weeks ago we read the story of Rumplestiltskin and today we watched an animated version of the story before carrying out a group character analysis of him.

There was a lot of conflicting reasons given for why he behaved the way he did, the discussions were exciting and detailed!

Then we watched a short clip of Olaf and had the chance to create our own individual character analysis.

There was a lot of great vocabulary used and some really insightful observations.

 

We spent our morning carrying out research in the library for our nonfiction books. This allowed us to develop our use of contents pages, glossaries and index’s as well as building our note taking skills and general knowledge. It was fun finding out where in the library our information would be.

The children have been inspired to start writing their own nonfiction books. Everyone was able to choose their own area of interest and we have spent the last few weeks researching and note taking. Today we looked at how chapters within non fiction are structured and made a start on writing our first chapters.

 

This week we have started to explore Genre. We watched a quick media clip explaining genre and then the children had to look at different texts and decide which genre they belonged to. They had to share the features of the text that supported their answer.

They were very interested in the poetry and play so we will be exploring more texts like these in the coming weeks.

The children have been challenged to read a wide variety of genres in their personal reading and this morning there was a great variety of texts being enjoyed.

This morning we introduced a new reading skill, we were learning all about prediction. We watched a video clip on prediction and updated our language journals with the strategies we can use to predict effectively.

Finally we got the chance to put our new skill to use! In groups we read stories and predicted what might happen next.

We used all the reading strategies we have learned so far to help us pull out the information we need to make sensible predictions.

Then we had a lot of fun coming up with predictions that had a twist!

It was an exciting language lesson today!

Reading skills have been a big focus for us this year and today we put our skills to the test by taking part in a quick on the draw activity.
The children got to choose the questions relating to their text that they wished to answer and the order they would like to answer them in.

The feedback from the children included:

• This is good
• Quite hard and easy
• Awesome
• I like it
• Super awesome

There was a real buzz of excitement in the classroom!

To mark World Teacher day we spent time this morning discussing what makes a great teacher. Then we each created a character profile to show the qualities we look for in a teacher.

Some qualities we looked for included:

• kind
• exciting
• sporty
• fun
• talented
• helpful
• different