What is TSI?
TSI stands for Transactional Strategies Instruction.
This means we use all our skills in comprehension such as predicting, visualizing, questioning, making connections, using prior knowledge, decoding and determining importance to help us improve our literacy skills.
How do we do it?
In fifth class we work in groups of three and we work on TSI three days a week.
Each session lasts for an hour. We read a variety of books. Teacher has picked a selection of books for us but soon we hope to pick some ourselves. Each person in the group has a role or a job to do. You are either a leader, a predictor or a questioner in your group. You have to spend some time at the beginning of TSI learning how to do each role. Each person in the group has their own job to do.
Each new session we change our roles so in one week you get to have a go at each role.
Why TSI?
In fifth class we’re big fans of TSI because:
• It helps train us to work as a team.
• It gives us more confidence.
• It helps our reading.
• Reading is more enjoyable.
• It helps you use new words in your writing.
• It helps train your reading, literacy and vocabulary.
• It helps you get through your reading better.
Read about our experiences below
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Ratheniska
Watch this space as our 5th class students are going to write all about their TSI experience here…
Here’s our first blog on TSI. This is from Gary, Noah and James. We have a few thoughts we’d like to share with you.
We have been doing TSI now for around four or five weeks. It’s something to look forward to in the afternoon.It was a bit confusing at the start and we needed to look at our prompt cards a lot but now it comes naturally to us.In fact you could call us experts but we still have a bit to go yet.
At the moment we’re just about finished our first book, “The Butterfly Lion” by Michael Morpurgo.
It’s always surprising us. For example you could have read three chapters which are completely different and then the fourth brings it all together. It keeps you on the edge of your seat and you can’t wait for the next instalment.
As a group we’ve always been great friends. A teacher might think that if you’re put with your best friends in TSI you might spend the time messing, but that’s not the case here because we think we work better together when we are with our friends.
We’re looking forward to the books we’ll read in the coming weeks, especially “Mr Stink” by David Walliams.We’re proud of the fact that we’re one of the first schools to do TSI and hope it catches on.