Sound Cubes

Our class has started using the new sound cubes to help us when we’re recording our voice on an iPad. These sound cubes block out all surround sound so we can clearly hear our voices on recordings we’ve made, e.g. we’ve recorded our voices using the Seesaw app to listen to our reading fluency, our sounding out skills, our ability to back up and re-read if we make a mistake and to hear what we sound like when we’re reading out aloud.

Our sound cubes are a fabric box (cube) and have egg cartons glued on cardboard along each side. Some have sound proof foam too. The cubes are really easy to use and we can’t wait until we try them again – what a great reason to keep reading.

Mannequin Challenge

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-8-28-16-pmToday as our class set up for our Daily 5 Listen to Reading session we started off with something a bit different!! We love to listen to stories using our iPads, iPods, laptops and computers. We listen to stories from Sunshine Online, Ziptales, Storyline Online and some different book apps.

It’s really important to listen to reading because:

  • it gives us ideas about how to read using expressive voices for characters
  • it shows us how to pronounce words
  • we listen to the speed or pace of the reading (steady, faster, slower paces as needed)
  • it can teach us how to sound out difficult words
  • it gives us examples of how to read fluently.

We also have some people doing read to self today because they’re reading books that they just LOVE.

Today we started Listen to Reading by doing  the ‘mannequin challenge’.  This viral video trend is where people remain frozen in action, like a mannequin. We’re sure you’ve all heard of it – well now you can see how our class does it!

What do you think of our Mannequin Challenge?  Did you see the students from the class next door watching us – they just couldn’t resist.

Listen to Reading

As a part of our Daily 5 reading we LOVE to use our devices to listen to stories on our iPads and iPods.

We have lots of different apps we use for different stories, a favourite one is Storychimes.

When we listen to reading we can hear how to use expression to make stories more interesting and come to life, we look at how the pictures support the words that tell the story and we love to hear someone read to us.

We use rockstars to help more than 1 person to hear the same story – you’ll see how we use our rockstars in our photos. We plug our earphones into the rockstar so that each of us can hear the story.

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Listen to Reading

Yesterday was our first session of Listen to Reading for the year. We wrote our anchor chart that keeps us on track for our reading behaviours. We LOVED our session and we were all very happy reading for just over 30 minutes – we would’ve read for longer but needed to do some other activities.

We used the class sites and apps mentioned on our blog to help our reading. We used laptops, desktop computers, iPods and iPads. After our session we shared some of the stories we’d heard and recommended them to our classmates.

Here’s some photos from our session.

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