week 7 summary

This week the group was divided due to some absences throughout the class.  I therfore sat with another group this week.  The discussion firstly started off with comparing the two different news articles on the same topic but writen by different journalists or different newspapers.   The group firstly looked at two articles on the recent Australian fallen diggers, the first article was looking at the need for our troops to return home and used frightening statistics and dark images to almost 'scare' the audience, whereas the second looked at rememerence of those who had fallen and refered to ANZAC DAY.  The images were a massive difference in the two. 

The first article was dark compared to the second that offered a wreath and a horizion and much brighter colours.  I brought up the differences of the two newspapers, the first written by 'The Australian' having a much larger audience and stating more facts and statistics whereas 'The Advertiser' was almost the opposite and mostly written by the authors opinions.  The articles I brought discussed the recent death of the Dutch tourist who was killed while trying to break up a fight in front of a Gawler pub.  Both the articles were writen on the 'Adelaide Now'website, but wrote about two very different topics.  The first had a more emotional connection with the reader focusing on the family of the man, whereas the second focused on the owners of pubs in Gawler calling on a need to close earlier and offered opinions of Government members.  Here we focused on the headlines, images, the words used such as choice of verbs, nouns and adjectives and also who we thought the articles were written for. 

The next activity was to show our two different cereal boxes.  Here I was the only member of the group who brought in cereal boxes, Rice Bubbles and Coca Pops.  Here our main discussion focused on 'who are these cereals aimed at?  we all concluded that both the brands where focused on children, with activities being provided on the box and the many childrens competitions they provided on the box.  A member of the class from another table discussed how she had focused on the nutrition chart on the cereal box which then led to a class discussion about the reading practices we may have been using as explained in this weeks readings.

Our next activity was to read a small text on 'Archaeology and Technology' as a text user.  firstly we were asked to skim read for one minute before making brief notes of what we had just read.  Lyn then asked us to re-read the text and 'scan' to find certain words, this was quite a difficult task.  Finally we were to put the text away and were to answer four questions based on the text. 

The final activity was to look at a book on 'Keeping Silk Worms'  and to determine the difference between guided reading and shared reading.   As a group we slowly went through the book and discussed that it was quite a difficult topic, we felt that the students should have some prior knowledge on the topic of silk worms or this would not make any sense to the children.  We felt this would be used in the middle of a topic and discussed cerain words that would have to be taught explicitly to the children.  Through this we found that a shared reading would be most appropriate for the book.  The book was broken into contents, pictures and processes which could stimulate great class disscussion and could get the students involved by asking questions and having the students use their prior knowledge.  This was a very packed session and therefore we didnt get time to discuss our individual reading novels and picture books.