Inferencing by The Brilliants

For the past two reading lessons the Brilliants have been doing a presentation on inferencing using fotobabble. 

We've been using the language from our Inquiry Model on this blog and you might be wondering what it's all about!  Here's a copy of the reading one (they'll all the same, it's just that the words that are especially helpful in each subject have been bolded to help us.)

This is what we did...

Building Knowledge.  First we brought what we knew about inferencing and found that all of us together had enough information to do it ourselves, though we found some more information and brainstormed together. 

Then we moved to Making Meaning, where we summarised it and considered how to organise it all. We negotiated what we would include in our presentation and who would say each part and we knitted some ideas together where possible. Then we began to plan and assemble our script.

Finally we moved to Applying our Understanding where we created our fotobabble. We created the script and applied our understanding by creating our own example of inferencing and we justified why it was inferencing. We solved the problem of writing our everyone's parts seperately by working off our original piece of paper. We also solved the problem of running out of time on fotobabble by taking out the dictionary definition we had - it was too long and we thought it actually made things quite confusing! We replaced it with our own definition which we thought was better anyway. We considered the possibilities of how to make a member of the group stay quiet (this was quite difficult) and came up with a solution to help them. Last but not least we applied what we learnt to our blog and recounted all the steps.

Break Through!

By Jamie and Alex

Daily Journal Writing by Jamie

For journal writing on Tuesday we wrote about a mystery trunk that we find under our house. We had to include a Metaphor and a Hyperbole. Here's mine...

One day when I was lying on my creaking, groaning bed I felt a sudden urge to go down to the basement and explore. I was a shadow as I tiptoed past my parent's room. I could hear their breathing. I was so quiet. When I got outside I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. The chilly, winter breeze froze me to the very bone. When I opened the basement door the moonlight reflected off a rusty piece of metal. Excited I ran towards it. It was a clasp. I snapped it open, realizing it belonged to a old, worn, down, leather trunk. It took an eternity to open the elephant sized lid. As I peaked inside I fell to the ground laughing. After all that, I was now the owner of... A pair of moth eaten socks.

Wet Park Scene by Damien H

I learned to set a scene based on the words "cold, wet, park bench." I learned what personification is and what a metaphor is.  A metaphor shows two things that are not the same but are similar in one important way and says it is something else.  eg. Ben is a monkey.  Personification is giving something that is not living a human trait.  eg. The stars winked at me.

Can you spot these in my setting paragraph?

"I shivered as the water torpedoes bombed the park making slippery wet puddles.  As I looked up at the black sky with white winking dot, I noticed the creak of the old swings that were desperate for oil.  The trees rustled as they were pummeled by explosive, clear droplets.  Their branches reached for the sky as they shivered in the wind."

By Damien H.

"Show, don't tell" by Paton

We wrote a scene setting focusing on 'show, don't tell'. I used the base words "Hot, dry, dusty."

We used adjectives, similes, personification, metaphors and hyperbole. We did this so when it came to writing our Mt Wellington story we knew what we were doing and then we could just get started right away.

I did not know those forms of figurative language and now I do thanks to my wonderful teachers and my determination!

"As I walked through the hot dessert the sun was beaming down on my back. The sand was dry and cracked and as a drop of my sweat landed on the sand it disappeared really quickly. I felt so dehydrated my throat felt like a piece of sand paper. Suddenly, sand started swirling around me. I fell to the ground, blinded by the sand. Tired and dehydrated, I lay down. As I looked up all I saw was the sun smiling at me. My eyes were heavy and as I closed my eyes all I saw was shimmering water."

By Paton