Book Club discussions have begun

We had our first lot of discussions today with our book club groups. We had to come up with a couple of fact questions (the answers will be straight in the text) and then come up with some discussion questions that made us think (the answer is in our head and not direcly stated in the book). If the answer was short it wasn't a good enough question. We had a sheet of question starters that helped us with our discussion questions. Some of us found this easy and many found it quite difficult. It's definitely a skill that we will be working on over this term! It was great to go around and listen to the discussions happening! 

Here we are:

Half way through...

Week 6 and an introduction to a new comprehension strategy - questioning. Good readers use questioning to help clarify their understanding. We played a game as a class where we read short paragraphs and had to ask questions to unlock the door to the castle. We went room to room asking and answering questions to unlock doors and find more information.

After our game we worked with a partner reading articles and using a question chart to create questions about the articles we were working on. We have to wait until tomorrow to share our work as we had to rush and pack up so that we could meet our buddies for 'Clean up Australia Day' in our school. We worked with a buddy to pick up rubbish in our designated areas. Many hands make light work and before you knew it the playground was spotless!

Number groups and then some HSIE where we looked at some of the wars that Australia has been involved in. We talked about World War 1 and how the landing in Gallipoli was a part of this war. We also looked at the Vietnam War and discovered which countries were involved. We visited Google Maps and explored the different places that we had spoken about. Some of us wanted to know why we would be involved in wars of places so far away from us. We spoke about the British Empire and how in WW1 many Australians felt a strong connection to the mother country (England) and wanted to not only fight for the 'Britsh Empire' but also for Australia.

The afternoon was spent looking at persuasive texts and planning out our arguments for convincing Mrs Taylor to let us sit next to a friend in class. We then had to elaborate on these arguments. This week we will look at using a hook as an introduction to our exposition. We talked about using a hook to grab the reader's attention and listened to examples of different hooks. Eg. Beginning with a question, an exaggeration, an idiom, onomatopoeia or by painting a picture. 

We finished a very busy and productive day with some graphing and chance work. 

Tomorrow we need to finish our penpal letters and send them to the school we have formed a partnership with in Shell Cove. There have been some very keen children asking about what is happening with our penpals and I've finally been able to say that we're going ahead! Very exciting!

Busy little bees!

What a busy day today. We continued looking at connections this morning and got into groups where we took turns reading to each other and discussing connections that we could make with the text. We then had to write down what the connection was and what type it was. I got to listen to half the class read to me and they learnt how much I like to take notes while they read. They did a fabulous job remembering to make their voices sound interesting and smooth and go back and re-read something if it didn't make sense. I was impressed! We got back together to share our connections and talk about the difference between a small connection and a deeper connection. Everyone managed to make a connection with one of the books their group looked at.

After reading groups we looked at common nouns. What are they? We worked out that most of what you can see with your eyes are common nouns. Eg. book, board, carpet, pencil, tote tray, windown. We also talked about Proper nouns and why they use a capital letter. We know that we're important and that is why we have a capital letter at the beginning of our names. After sharing the common nouns we knew, we worked in our grammar text books and before we knew it was time to pack up for recess.

Number groups followed shortly after recess. There were only a few reminders about what rooms to go to and then followed a good hour of maths. Too soon maths was over and it was time for some HSIE. We talked about what we knew about ANZAC day and made a great list that included the what the poppy represents, where ANZAC biscuits come from, the story of Simpson's donkey and a couple more. Some of us knew about family members that had fought in wars and were keen to share what they knew with the class.

The afternoon included writing the rest of our stories, marking our grammar work, reading some of our class novel, skip counting and tables practice and our end of the day jar question.

I'm looking forward to reading lots of interesting stories!

Connections everywhere

We started Monday of week 3 with the important task of allocating class jobs. We have messengers, lunch monitors and door monitors all the way to line leaders and library monitors. And everyone did a fabulous day of fullfilling their duties. On to spelling and working out what sort of rules we were looking at this week. We worked out that there were words that had the 'ee' sound in them, ones beginning with 'uni' which we found out means 'one' and also that plurals are usually formed by just adding 's' and they mean 'more than on'. 

 This term in reading we are looking at the super six comprehension strategies. These six strategies are: making connections, making predictions, summarising, inferring, visualising and questioning. Today we started looking at 'making connections' with 4S and Mr Smyth. We talked about the different sort of connections we can make when we are reading. They are 'text-text', 'text-world' and 'text-self' connections. When we listen to a story or read a book and we notice something in the book that reminds us of something we have been through or seen or done, we are making a 'text-self' connection. We got to write our connections on post-it notes and put them up in Mr Smyth's room. Here is why making connections is important: Students who make connections while reading are better able to understand the text they are reading. It is important for students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences to connect with the text. Students are thinking when they are connecting, which makes them more engaged in the reading experience. 

 After recess we got put into our Number Groups. These will be fluid for the first few weeks as we make sure that everyone is in the right place. We will be having number groups on Monday, Tuesday and Friday after recess for one hour. I'm already looking forward to number groups tomorrow! Maths was one of my favourite subjects when I was in primary school. Well to be honest I really loved most of the subjects in primary school! Back to class and we got given our HSIE books and got to get our title page ready for this term's work. We will be looking into ANZAC Day a little more deeply this year as it is the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. We will also be exploring communities around us and hopefully connect with another primary school in NSW to write some letters as penpals. I'm just finalising this connection! I have my fingers crossed that we get to go ahead with this. Lunch was over before we knew it and we came in to talk about what a 'narrative' is and what makes it a story. We talked about 'characters', the 'setting' and of course the 'problem' that is overcome in the story. We came up with some interestingly named characters and settings and some violent problems. I particularly liked the story about a group of talking fruit who lived in a fruit bowl. Unfortunately for them they had to deal with the problem of being eaten! We spoke about our homework today. Homework will be handed out on Mondays and usually go home. Today we did some of our homework 'mentals' since we only have one week until homework is due. We will also set out our homework books tomorrow just the way that I like them. We need to wait until tomorrow as there are many homework books that haven't made their way to school yet. Finally we packed our bags with numerous notes and it was home time. Wow! What a busy day!