Whole Class Junior Journal 64 Resource Year 3: What is a Tree?
Description
Enhance Your Students’ Reading Comprehension with Science of Reading Principles. This comprehensive resource based on the article ‘What is a Tree>’ from Junior Journal 64, will develop your students’ reading comprehension while also developing key content knowledge. It is a great addition to your Year 3 structured literacy program.
What is a Tree – Junior Journal 64: This article integrates English literacy skills with Science concepts by exploring the structure and survival of trees and highlighting the unique habitats of native, endemic, and introduced plants across Aotearoa New Zealand.
Our unique teaching tools engage students in deep comprehension strategies, vocabulary building, sentence structure and punctuation, verbal reasoning, and content knowledge – key elements of the Science of Reading approach.
How It Works:
This resource is designed for whole-class teaching. You receive a slideshow with 65 slides, additional support worksheets, and graphic organisers.
- Simply display the Junior Journal PDF on your projector or TV screen and distribute copies of the text between 2-3 students. With the slides in Presenter View, you’ll have everything you need for a successful lesson—just click and go!
- The resource divides the text into three manageable chunks to be read over three sessions, allowing ample time to explore the article’s vocabulary and content.
- Along with the text, we’ve included a set of discussion prompts to get your students talking and thinking critically about what they’re reading.
On days three, four and five, explore the text further with:
- A GIST summarising activity
- A text structure analysis graphic organiser (descriptive concept map)
- Critical thinking questions to encourage deeper connections and inferences.
Key Features:
- Focus on monitoring comprehension, summarising, drawing conclusions, and using evidence.
- Comprehension activities that require students to do more than recall specific information.
- Literacy activities that link to key writing skills (sentence structure and punctuation)
- A GIST summarising activity, helping students condense the text into a 20-word summary, improving both their understanding and memory.
- A concept map (description text structure) graphic organiser to analyse the structure of this text.
- Explicit vocabulary instruction with definitions, examples, and semantic activities such as synonyms and antonyms.
- Paragraph writing summary activity
- Activities that tie directly to the New Zealand English Curriculum for Year 3 students, with a focus on comprehension, summarising, and using evidence to make inferences.
Aligned with the New Zealand English Curriculum: This resource supports teaching students how to:
- Monitor and confirm comprehension by annotating, rereading, asking, answering questions, and visualising.
- Summarise and draw conclusions, identifying key details supporting the text’s main message.
- Make inferences using stated and implied ideas, drawing from prior knowledge.
- Analyse text structure and the language used for effect with a text
- Think critically about a text by analysing perspectives and making connections.
Tips for Use:
- Use the PowerPoint in presentation mode for easy, seamless delivery.
- Display the text on the screen and give students a copy to read together in pairs or small groups.
- Follow the suggested activities over three sessions, with additional follow-up activities on days four and five to extend learning.
