Questioning

We are also learning about the comprehension strategy called Questioning. We are still practising using this strategy in school.

If we ask questions before, during and after we read it helps us to think more about what we read, help us to organise what we are thinking and find certain information we need to help us understand what we read. If we ask ourselves questions as we read it helps us to focus on the text.

We are making up our own questions as we read. Some of these questions can be answered in the story, but some are not, and that is okay because we can read between the lines and make some predictions, or we could try and find out the answer by researching it more.

We are using 'I wonder' questions a lot. Our hand signal for this strategy is a 'W' with our hands to show 'I wonder'.

We have been enjoying a lot of books in school as we work on using our strategies. Here is one of the books we have used for questioning:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorist

We are also finding that we are getting very good at using all of the strategies we have learned while we listen to a story or read by ourselves. We use our hand signals and share our predictions, connections, visualisations and questions in class. We can use these strategies to help us understand anything we read.

Watch us on News2day!

We appeared on News2day today at 4.25pm on RTE Two!
We had such an exciting day taking part in the 'Alice in Litterland' workshop and then we met Conor from News2day who recorded parts of the workshop and found out information about it.

Here is a link to Friday's news if you missed it. We are so proud. Well done to everybody! Enjoy watching!

Mad as a Hatter!

We have been busy turning everyday items from the recycling bin into imaginative hats!

Photos and more information to follow soon . . .

Making Connections

The strategy we are learning about and using this week is Making Connections.

We have been making great connections this week to a wide range of texts. We are doing great work at home too. Good readers consider how a text relates to their own life experiences and knowledge. When we make connections with a text it helps with our understanding. It helps us make a clearer picture in our head. We become actively involved and it helps us to remember what we have read and ask questions about the text.


There are three types of connections we can make:

Text to Self Connections - these are our personal connections to the text. Sometimes we can make connections with our own life.

Text to Text Connections - sometimes a story can remind us of something else we have read. They might have a similar character or theme. We can make links between two sections of the same book too.

Text to World Connections - this is when we can make a link between the text and knowledge we get from somewhere else such as films, environment and newspapers.

This is our hand signal to show when we have a connection to make.

We made an anchor chart to remind us about making connections and why we make connections too.

We are very good at using the strategies we are learning when we read!