Tag: Reading

LI: to analyse character traits to understand the story.

This week we have  analysed the text The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. After reading the story, we completed a story response which we wrote replies to the stories answering the questions. When you are reading a book, you can analyse characters in order to understand the book in deeper connection.

One of the character story response sheet was what details that we might expect are not provided by the author. We thought sharply what the author hasn’t told us, eg: the author did not tell us how he understood to disguise himself, and manipulate the situation.

I enjoyed doing this activity because reading others responses made me consider their ideas and use them to my furthest knowledge.

LI: to understand how person and perspective is used in texts.

Looking at different texts and characters, our group had come up with the definitions of first, second and third person perspective. Different characters show different perspectives which is why understanding how to point out person and perspective is an important ability to have. To point out the different persons, you can scan the text for the use of pronouns. For example, if the piece of text I was reading contained; “he, she, they” I would know that the text was written in third person. Therefore the story was written in the narrator’s point of view.

LI: To keep our reading going during the school holidays.

The focus on the RFE holiday challenge was to keep students in LS2 to continue with their reading in the time off school.

This holiday programme consisted of reading different books and completing challenges we (Chisa, Farzana, Bella, Te Raumati, Santana, & David) have created for them to complete. The challenge is based on three different activities they could do (e.g. they can do the simple, neutral, or a level a bit higher) and gain a certain amount of points for each activity completed. For example, if I had completed the neutral activity and the hardest activity for day 1, I would gain 3 points + 5 points which would total to 8 points. 

The reward for keeping their reading going for their holidays was, if the readers had completed ⅔ activities for 3 days, they were able to have a special lunchtime at school. We (Chisa and Farzana) had run the programme throughout the holidays, gave feedback, collected data and added the points.

Farzana and I looked at the finished work sheet and gave a lot of feedback to the people who participated. We made sure to look at their work properly, give constructive criticism, asked questions and made connections with the activities they had completed. Each day, we were very impressed with the amount of work done and seeing the consistency of the work. 

When the holidays had passed and we were back at school, we totalled the points of people who contributed to the reading challenges and found out who had won the top three places. The readers who had the highest points would win special prizes. 

During this time, I found it interesting, and hard to give students feedback without repeating the same feedback. One thing I noticed about this RFE holiday challenge was how we should’ve made the instructions more clearer, as students didn’t read a variety of books but only had 2-3 books type of texts, to complete all the activities. 

We have been exploring the ways writers use words to create mood and atmosphere in a text. Our group used a text we read in class called ‘The Soldier Who Never Returned.’ You can see the ways the author used different langauge features to create mood and atmosphere in this text by looking at the examples we have highlighted and explained in our DLO.

My favourite example in the text we read was ‘As it waits for the soldier who never came hom’ because the author had used personification, which is giving an object a human like reference to the bottle, which still waits for its owner till this very day.  

I found this activity enjoying, because it helped me to learn new language features, which also helped me to identify them in the texts that my group read. 

LI:To find evidence in the text to support your answer.

This week our group read the text Family Photographs. After reading the text and thinking about the information in the article our challenge was to support the statements based on the questions given. This means also looking at the photos for clues and ideas to give us more information.

This activity was interesting because it helped us learn what type of evidence we need to support a information text.

For reading we did a dot to dot connection task, which would help us link ideas to each 7 words. I worked with Hector, Fala, and Te Raumati , to get some good ideas from each other. For example we can connect treaty to honour because it was a big part of New Zealand history. Another connecion we can do is protection and iwi, because the Maori people wanted protection, partnership, and participation.

I found this activity hard because it was hard to find the connections between each topics.