Critical Thinking....

Kia Ora Bloggers,

in today's post, I will be talking about reading. If you didn't already know, one of our reading groups has been basing their learning around 'Novel Study'

A novel study is where you read a book and then you answer comprehension questions and you might do an activity or two around that. The two books we have are "My sister lives on the mantelpiece" by Annabel Pitcher & "The boy in the Striped Pyjamas" by John Boyne. I have been reading the book by John Boyne. If you would like to see the things I have been doing and need to do, here is the link.

Over the last week, we have been finishing off everything as well as, answering and thinking about very critical questions. We had to get into groups of three, we each got given a pile of 'Critical Literacy Questions' and we had to choose the 4 questions that we thought were the most relevant to our book.

This took a little bit of time but it was very fun. I think that the questions my group chose were very on point. Afterwards, all of the groups got together and did a vote on which were the best. We had discussions about the different questions and they were very interesting.

Our 2nd session on this, is where we were given 3 questions to answer, and after we answered them, we had to share it creatively. So, I decided to ask somebody to do this with me and we just made a video of us answering the questions and having a conversation about it, here blog is here: Grace's blog

 Here is our video:

Thank You for watching and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

If there are any other ways you think I could have shown my critical literacy, please tell me.

See you next time and thank you again, for reading.

Nga Mihi,

- Julia

A Wish That Turns Into A Dream

Kia Ora Bloggers! This post is going to be about our classes long write. Over the past few weeks we have been learning how to write in present tense. The piece of writing we did wasn't exactly present tense but it is close. It is based off of a short movie called "The Dream Giver". Here is the Video:

To start the process of a long write, we would normally watch a video and brainstorm ideas based off of that, look at a photo and use that as a starter to help us think of a story or we would do a long write with a paragraph as a starter.

As you can tell, we used this video. Our lovely teachers will always have a planning sheet set up either on paper or in our document on the Chromebook. We will plan throughout the different stages of our story, no sentences just points we want to put in.

We will have forty minutes to write this. We have a success criteria that we will normally look at before we start writing our story so we know what we need to add to make our story more interesting and descriptive to really capture the reader. After we finish writing the story we will fill out our success criteria and answer some questions. *Rule for Success Criteria, Green = I did it well, Orange = I can do better, Red = I didn't use it.

Here is the 'Success Criteria':

For this story, we needed to create a story with our 'Dream Giver'. Before we could even start planning, we created our own 'Dream Giver'. Here is mine:

After that, our lovely teachers told us that we were going to base our dream on something that we aspire to be or really want, a dream of ours. This is what we would base our story on.

After our planning sheet, I wrote my story, I put it in a slide so it would be easier to read. Here it is:

Some challenges for me was probably thing of descriptive language to put in and also using present tense, I think this was hard because when you are into a story, you don't think about putting a whole bunch of description in.

Something I found easy was thinking of what I wanted my dream to be.

If you had a 'Dream Giver', what would you want your dream to be about?

Thank you for reading this blog post, I hope you enjoyed reading this. 

Bye.