Welcome back to Term 3

Dear all,

It's been awhile. Welcome back to Term 3. It will be a hectic term ahead with plenty of holidays and your CA2 drawing near. Lets' work hard together. We can do it! :)

For a start, we are concentrating on Comprehension Open-ended for this week. I have been drilling and practising the skill of Pre-Reading with you for the first semester. This is a basic and important skill of reading the questions first and understanding the story through the questions. As you read the question, ask yourself what you know and what you want to know. Therefore, highlight the key words in the questions such as 5W1H and the tenses.

For this term, I am concentrating on teaching you how to break down the passage further and more comprehensively through the skills of summarizing and retelling. We summarized the story through the use of answering the key questions being posed by me in your group work. Also, we make notes in the passage such as the introduction, key characters, events, what happened during the event and after the event.

Make sure that you make notes and read carefully. As mentioned in class, there are three different levels of comprehension - zero, partial, full. Most of you are at the level of partial to full comprehension. Do not just read on the surface. You need to ask yourself questions and make notes to fully comprehend the passage and details.

We also did retelling through telling the story again through the use of images. Images provide a powerful tool to visualise the story and recap the story. Through your drawings, we are able to see if you have fully internalised the story by re-telling the story.

We will also be concentrating on the use of newspaper articles this term to help in your comprehension and vocabulary.

Work hard! =D

Sincerely,
Mr Nelson Ong