This is Fifth Class rounding up our T.S.I experience for this year. After our second bash at T.S.I we can confirm that it has improved our reading, writing and increased our vocabulary, especially after Covid. While we were doing home schooling we started to lose our confidence in reading aloud however we are now very confident at reading not only in our small groups but now to the whole class. We learned a lot from T.S.I and have read many interesting books along the way such as Holes, Mr Stink, There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom and too many more to mention.
Last cycle we mixed it up and some days we read our book “Holes” all together as a whole class taking turns and then chatting together about the events of the book. Other days we got into our small groups to work on the book. It was interesting to find out that some of us enjoyed reading together as a whole class better some days as they felt the room was less noisy and they could concentrate more easily on reading or listening. Some enjoyed everyone reading the same book as you could hear many different reactions to the story. Some days some of us definitely preferred working in our smaller groups as we got to read more ourselves and find it easier to share ideas in the smaller group too. All in all it was an interesting experience to mix it up every now and then.
We have worked in large groups and small groups. We practice different types of reading such as popcorn reading and we worked very hard to improve our fluency. We get asked questions and we make up questions too. We also use many strategies such as making predictions, connecting to characters, summarising and comparing and contrasting. In our opinion T.S.I is cool and a great way to learn not just about the book but about your classmates too and how they figure out stuff and what they enjoy!
To wrap up our Fifth Class experience we worked on our “Story in a Box.” This is where we created a scene from a book we had read during T.S.I in a shoebox relying on our creativity and some patience. We got to work in pairs or individually and the final results were something else. Take a look below.
