English in Year 4!

Year 4 have been working really hard on their comprehension skills in our Shared Reading sessions this week.

We have enjoyed reading about earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanos in our class text: ‘Earth Shattering Events’ by Robin Jacobs.

In Friday’s lesson the class practiced their retrieval skills by working closely with their learning partners to find answers to a series of questions.

We began the lesson by defining key vocabulary which we would need to know in order to understand the text. The class used dictionaries and the internet to find the definitions of words such as magma, lava, molten and soda. Then, in pairs, we read 5 pages of the the book, all about the types of volcanoes and the eruptions they can cause.

After this we took it in turns to ask our learning partners questions about what we had read and it was their job to find the correct information in the book!

Finally, Year 4 worked independently to answer some written questions in their books. They wrote all of their answers using full sentences, included key vocabulary from the text, and even had a go at writing their own questions about the text for their learning partners to try and answer…

Well done Year 4!

Can you predict some other natural disasters which we might read about in Earth Shattering Events?