Teacher training task - help

[Lolly2803]

Hello, I currently TA in a school in Year 1. Last year I TA’d in Reception. I have applied to do my teacher training next year and have an assessment day next week. As part of the assessment I need to plan and teach a 30 min reading task to Year 5. Quite honestly I have no idea. I’m going to watch year 5 next week to just observe the teacher etc but guess I’m looking for some help with lesson ideas and how I can knock their socks off. Any help or advice much appreciated!

You could choose a text and give a copy to each child. Pick out vocabulary for them to highlight and discuss meanings of the words - use dictionaries and write definitions or synonyms. Ask them to summarise the text in 20 words. Understanding vocabulary and summarising are reading skills that year 5 will be working on. You could also pick a paragraph and teach/ get them to practise reading aloud with prosody, emphasising diifferent word or phrases, speeding up and slowing down for effect so that they are improving how they read to an audience. If your school has a subscription to grammasaurus that's good for texts that you might want to use and also has reading skills questions to go with the texts.

Ah thank you I’ll look that up, that’s a good idea. I had thought of also (tell me if this is awful) but picking a new text and getting them to “investigate” the covers and blurb for clues as to what the story could be about and get them to write some predictions. I will then have a predictions jar and get them to fold up and place their predictions in my jar and once they’ve read the book they can go back to them and see if they were right. Not sure that would take half an hour though. Would I read any of it to them? I’m clueless!

The predictions jar is a good idea. I guess you'd have to use the book that the class are going to read next for their class novel. If it has a cover that shows clues about the setting or plot as well as an interesting blurb then you'd be able to extend the task to half an hour by having a short writing labelling task around a picture of the cover. They can write a sentence about the title, author, illustrator, setting, characters, plot prediction if there's enough information on the cover. Have sentence starters ready for those that need support. They can then share and explain their predictions to the class and explain their reasoning.

One thing that may be helpful is to be aware that ITT interviews don't expect you to be perfect. They are looking to weed out people who really aren't suitable, rather than looking for the finished article already. As long as you plan something that is sensible and you interact with the students in a positive way, that will be a big tick in your favour.

I think your predictions idea sounds great- I think it might be a good idea to read to them (demonstrates your skills) but maybe also encourage the children to read some of the text out loud as well.

The prediction idea is a nice one but you run the risk of a reading session where the children don't actually do any reading. I would consider making predictions based on the cover and blurb the opening task, and then read the opening few pages as a reciprocal reading session: model the prosody of high-quality reading as chn follow along and use the four-question model of predict - clarify - question - summarise to structure the session.

Ah great that sounds good. I’ll have a look at the model and see if I can do that too. I was also going to start by showing an image and asking them to predict what happens next to make sure they understand “prediction” properly.
I will then read a few pages and ask them to read aloud with me? As in a few children read a few lines. Conscious I only have half an hour…

Or I could read a few pages and then ask a few children to read out their predictions and then get them all to read them to a partner before putting around in the jar.