Observation Clevedon #5

Rachael has fine tuned her Daily Five options and shared with the whole class. She is just working with Reading at the moment. Students are able to access this through Google Docs. Her aim is to develop independence and self management.

I worked with a reading group today in Rebecca's room, with a particularly difficult text on estuaries (The secret life of Estuaries. Connected 3 2006). Students had their iPads and journals and we worked at the TV Learning Zone. Students had the Dictionary app open so that they could look up words that they didn't know.

 When I do this activity again I will get students to record in Notability what words they checked, and a followup task would be to find the suitable dictionary meaning using Dictionary (or search in Google with search term being the 'word' and Define). They could write the sentence from the book and replace the dictionary word with a synonym if applicable.

Every now and then I would ask a student to mirror their iPad so that we could discuss the dictionary term they were looking at.

There were 2 diagrams in the story. I got them to take a photo of the first diagram and annotate the different parts of it. When we came to the next diagram they did the same thing. The diagrams were a visual aid of the text relating to the text they had just read. Some of them started to jot down some notes as they would have to write an explanation later.