GOOD LUCK AND FAREWELL

Dear Students,

We have come to the end of the semester and this is a brief note to bid you farewell. I would like to wish you the best in all your undertakings in the future. I hope you have enjoyed the reading class and the class blog. I must say that I am very happy you have learnt about blogging so quickly - I was just lucky to teach a group of intelligent bloggers in my class. Once you leave the class you can still have access to the class blog and all the material and links provided for you. You are very welcome to keep your student blogs active if you wish.
I have put some materials on the right for you if you like to practise... 

ENCYCLOPAEDIAS - features

An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of information from either all branches of knowledge or from a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are often arranged alphabetically by article name and sometimes by thematic categories. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries.

Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years and have evolved considerably as a valued source of reliable information compiled by experts, printed versions found a prominent place in libraries, schools and other educational institutions.

The appearance of digital and open-source versions in the 20th century has vastly expanded the accessibility, authorship, readership, and variety of encyclopedia entries and called into question the idea of what an encyclopedia is and the relevance of applying to such dynamic productions the traditional criteria for assembling and evaluating print encyclopedias.

Information and graphic texts

An information text is a piece of non-fiction writing which gives information about a particular thing (for example: Cleopatra, Ancient Egypt, recycling or volcanoes). Information texts are sometimes called non-chronological reports, because they are giving information about something without mentioning the order in which it happened.

Features of information texts

Students will usually be asked to research something relevant to their learning, for example: if they are learning about the Victorians in history, they may be asked to research a certain area, such as child labour or Victorian funerals. They will look at various texts and discuss the features:

• main title
• sub-headings
• bullet points
• paragraphs
• pictures and captions.

They will then make notes on their topic, possibly on a spider diagram.

Note-making is an important skill and it cannot be taken for granted that children automatically know how to do it! Teachers will model this skill, by reading a sentence shown on the board and then asking children to say which the most important words are. For example, they might show a paragraph like this:

If a Victorian woman lost her husband she was called a widow. The period of time after her husband's death was called mourning. She would wear black for two years while she was in full mourning. She would then spend a period of six months in half mourning, during which time she would wear grey or lavender clothes.