I have been continuing to focus on my deliberate acts of teaching at reading time this term. Inspired by Helen Squires' inquiry conversations I have focused on explicitly teaching vowel sounds in my class, which has evolved into reading and writing simple consonant-vowel-consonant three letter words. The children seem to be enjoying this and I sense the occurrence of quite a few 'aha' moments as the children start to click and see the patterns of sound in these words.
I have also endeavoured to 'read to' my class more frequently and delve in depth into texts, allowing more of a personal response from the class, and the chance for them to extend their vocabulary and explore the potential of using these words themselves in their iPad recordings.
One of my Magenta readers, with incomplete alphabet knowledge and a huge reliance on copying teacher writing, did exceptionally well at recording his ideas on creating a new Gruffalo story last week:
I will continue to further extend on these ideas for the remainder of this term.
