This week, we have started a new reading book - The Secret Sky Garden. We discussed the front cover and the authors, before moving on to predicting what the book might be about. Then, we looked at the language used within the text, identifying the meaning of some words and phrases. We discussed what we liked about the story and how it could be improved. 

We continue to use the VIPERS questions to understand more about vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and sequencing. We focused this week on inferences and retrieval and are building the skills we need when completing reading comprehension activities. 

What an excellent first week of Reading lessons we have had! We started off by looking at some of the key vocabulary we would need to understand whilst reading 'The Great Kapok Tree' such as 'canopy' 'emerging' and 'environment' and we learnt what these words, along with lots of others, meant.

We then read the first few pages and made predictions about what we thought would happen next, using evidence from the text to support our answers.

After this, we read the whole story! We expressed our views and opinions, discussing what we liked and disliked about the story as well as what we still wondered about the text. We used the sentence starter 'I wonder' to help us.

Finally, we completed a hot-seating activity where we had to think about the story from different perspectives. We discussed why the author wrote the book and the impact she wanted it to have on the reader. Some of us were the animals and others were humans, and we asked questions such as 'what about the homes of the animals?' and 'what will happen to the levels of oxygen?' leaving the human to answer these questions based on what we had learnt from the story. 

This week, we have started to learn more about VIPERS and have been answering questions surrounding vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and sequencing. We have been working together with our reading partners and unpicking the text from The Great Kapok tree, evaluating and discussing it. We have also been developing our understanding of how to write in full sentences when we are answering questions - we will continue to work on these skills throughout our Reading lessons! 

We are continuing to develop our reading comprehension skills through our Reading lessons and have an excellent understanding of the text 'The Great Kapok Tree'. We have been making inferences about the story throughout and thinking carefully about the impact of cutting trees down and destroying rainforests. Finally, we tried summarising the story in a few sentences. This is a super tricky skill but we continue to work really hard during lessons