Journey to the River Sea - 25 Whole Class Reading Lessons

A series of 25 whole class reading notebook lessons about, possibly my favourite children’s book, Journey to the River Sea.

This resource contains 25 notebook lessons as well as all accompanying resources. My slides will guide you from start to finish through this wonderfully engaging book that the children will love! The slides are intended to be taught to the whole class using the increasingly popular whole class reading approach.

Each lesson usually takes the same format:
Starter/ opening task (some lessons do not have a starter task)
Pre-teach vocabulary that will come up in the reading
read the book with the class - all page numbers provided (I like to use a mixture of Teacher reading, partner reading, choral reading, and echo reading)
A short input/ modelling before the task
Task slide - various activities including comprehension questions, a themed quiz, drawing scenes from the book and character connection maps etc.

Note: To maintain variety, slides sometimes slightly differ from this format.

The series of lessons is appropriate for Year 5 to Year 6 children but can easily be adapted.

All lessons are linked to the English Reading National Curriculum and comprehension questions usually focus on practising a specific reading skill.

Learning objectives include: predicting, summarising, retrieving information, inference, finding evidence to justify an answer as well as reading fluently with expression.

Some of the tasks include differentiation. I use a green, yellow, red chilli system, where children start on either green or yellow and then can move on to the more challenging red chilli.

Please be aware that the 25 lessons focus in on certain points in the book and much of the actual reading of the book would need to be read outside of the lesson time. My slides clearly state which pages should be read before the next lesson. This helps keep the pace of reading up and maintains the children’s interest. For example, there are two points in my slides where I focus on simply reading for pleasure. One point is around halfway through the book and the other is towards the end as I found the children just wanted to find out what happens at the end!

The children in my class loved practising their reading skills using Journey to the River Sea and my slides. I’m sure other children will also!