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Ratheniska National School

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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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TSI 2018 Blog#16

Ratheniska

In 5th Class we are just finishing our second cycle of T.S.I. This is our fourth cycle of T.S.I since we began in fourth class and overall it’s been a very enjoyable experience.

During this T.S.I cycle we have read a large variety of books including The Honest Truth, Brock, The Butterfly Lion, Mr. Stink, Faraway Home and The Boy in The Girls Bathroom. These books have covered a broad range of topics. For example, David Williams’ Mr Stink is very humorous while also discussing current topical social issues such as homelessness. Some other books have covered dark themes such as Marilyn Taylor’s Faraway Home describing the struggles of World War 2 and The Honest Truth telling the story of a boy fighting cancer.

We find this greater in depth analysis of these books has helped us in other areas and subjects. For example, Faraway Home helped us to empathise with the suffering of people during World War 2.  Other books like The Honest Truth and Brock taught us very important life lessons such as resilience and determination.

T.S.I has evolved for us since we began two years ago. We now read more, write less and have more meaningful discussions. We now clearly focus on different comprehension strategies each week while consolidating strategies already learned in previous TSI cycles. This TSI we focused mainly on inference, determining importance and summarising.

 One of the main advantages of TSI we believe is working independently in small groups. This allows us greater book choice so that we can pick books that suit and interest all of us in the group. Also, it has given us more reading time which has improved our fluency greatly. We are more comfortable in small groups and not as self-conscious about making mistakes.

TSI has greatly improved our vocabulary which has helped our comprehension across all areas. This has had a hugely positive effect in our writing and would you believe it, it has even improved the way we speak.

   All in all we have found T.S.I a fun and easy way to enjoy books and learn. We definitely read more books independently now as a result of the confidence TSI has given us.