RPI Week 2 Homework Reflection

 This week I have introduced making good quality predictions to the class. This was a skill I thought my students would find easy, however they have really struggled with it. During lessons I have had to really unpack what it means, how to do it well and how we know we are successfully doing it - more than once with each group. 

Introducing the WALT and SC have really helped the students to understand what predicting is and given them the language to use when describing their own predictions. The part students struggled with the most, was making a prediction that was justified using the clues given. Once the students were clear about the SC we then used this information to practice making predictions using the text title, subtitles, pictures and captions. They then had to explain why they made the prediction they did. 

Making good predictions has also been modelled to students during our shared novel sessions. I am currently reading The Twits by Roald Dahl to the class. I have also used this to encourage students to predict the upcoming events based on the chapter titles and previous events from the text. 

One of the ways students could record evidence that they could make good predictions was by recording it on a google doc template I provided. This took them a while. They then read the text and recorded whether their predictions were correct on the google doc. 

The theme for reading this week was about animals in zoos. This topic was chosen because I noticed that on the reading interest survey a lot of the students said they enjoyed reading about animals. This topic is also being used as our persuasive writing topic for the next two weeks - allowing the students to build the knowledge required to write a quality persuasive argument.