These question starters are really useful for supporting your child at home when they read to/with you. they can be adapted to any book your child is reading and will develop their comprehension of the text they have read and broaden their acquisition of vocabulary. 
 

Encouraging your child to read regularly at home is also a great way to support their reading journey. In Year 5 we read each morning without fail for ten minutes and finding another opportunity to read for ten minutes each day at home would provide the children with fantastic opportunities to widen their knowledge of vocabulary and practise reading for speed. 

Joining the local library is another way to support your child with reading at home. Applications can be made in any Lancashire library or online using the link below. This is a great way to try out books without purchasing them. Once your have a membership you can download the BorrowBox app and use your account to download magazines, ebooks and audio books. Mrs Hall has put something on the Year 5 Class Dojo with more details. 

On Children in Need week we spent the time each day recording how many times we actively participated with reading in our school day. We were amazed! 

To encourage our reading in all lessons we are given the opportunity to read instructions for the lesson. This supports our understanding of vocabulary for the lesson and also encourages our verbal discussion. 

To earn this badge, you must:

• Be aged between 5-15 years old.

• Tell us about a book you have read and what you think about it. Maybe you liked the characters, or perhaps you enjoyed going on exciting adventures in faraway places.
• Upload your illustration of a character or a scene from the story. This could be a drawing, painting or even digital artwork.
• Let us know what other books and authors you have enjoyed reading and why.

• Get your parent or guardian to help you fill out your form and personal details.

One of our class has already successfully achieved a Blue Peter Badge for her hard work in reading. Well done! 

We were really lucky to have our parents join us for an inference lesson. 
 

We showed them how to use question words identify what type of answer was required. We demonstrated the process of annotating a question to focus ur attention and how to use the PEE strategy to structure our answers with evidence and explanations. 

During our parent session in Autumn 1, we demonstrated our teaching technique for how to write an answer for comprehension questions that require evidence and explanations. These handouts were given to parents to use at home when supporting children with comprehension homework. 

At the beginning of each day we read our reading book. These are books which are suitable for our individual reading ability. We read for 10 minutes whilst the register is taken and then we are random selected to give a summary of the pages we have read or tell our partner about what we have just read. 
 

After this we also have the opportunity to complete any quizzes or to visit the library to change our book independently. This is checked by an adult on return to the classroom to ensure it matches our book levels. 

In History lessons our input and research is carefully selected to allow us the opportunity to develop our reading. We have to put our reading knowledge into practise to deduce the information we need to learn about our periods of time, in this case the Ancient Egyptians. we also have our selected books on the twisted display unit to choose from during history learning so that we can extend our knowledge or research extra detail to add to our independent writing. 
 

Each week we learn about current affairs through our Picture News sessions. There is a summary to read and then further detail about the weekly issue and tasks to complete so we can empathise with the people involved in the news. The layout and presentation also differs to other styles of writing so we can discuss the purpose of this. 
 

In science we read regularly. This could be when we are researching a scientist. In this picture we are reading about Scientist Spencer Silver to learn what he invented and which scientific concepts were involved. Through this type of reading we encounter a lot of subject specific vocabulary.

This half term in our reading corner, we have a Mary Poppins theme to encourage the children to think beyond the front cover when selecting their books. We have a laptop so pupils can access their book quizzes when necessary and also a little book where recommendations can be placed. We are building a question prompt display to think about the characters. Books are organised so pupils can find appropriately challenging texts and these are rotated regularly for variety. 
 

As a class, the children selected some new books for our classroom library corner. Here are some they chose;

Which certificate have you got? 

We have 9 children in Year 5 that have earned their Advanced  Reader certificate in the first half of the Autumn. What did they have to do?

• Independently read 3 books at 3.0 level or above and take quizzes on them. 
• These quizzes must be passed successfully.  
• Each book must be worth 2 points or more.

Sometimes it is easy to get comfortable with reading a series or sticking with a familiar author. It’s really important to read wide to increase exposure to a variety of language, vocabulary and writing style. The above pictures offer a few suggestions to break the cycle and try a new book. 

In October we had a zoom interview with Hannah Gold. She has written The Last Bear, The Lost Whale and her newest book, Finding Bear. She told us about her twenty year battle to write a suitable book and have it published. She also created an excitement for the book which made us all want to read it. It is about a very current topic of the impact of climate change. Hannah gave us a lot of information about polar bears, herself and why she started writing. At the end of her interview she gave us a little quiz to make sure we had understood all that we had been told. 

At the end of each half term teachers analyse the data on the Accelerated Reader programme to see how many words the children have read. This is generated through counting of the words in books that the children have taken quizzes on and passed. 
 

In Autumn 1 31 of our KS2 children had read over 50,000 words. Eleven of these were our Year 5 pupils.