The kids and I going through a bit of a Twinkl eBook craze at the moment. My youngest loves them and I must admit I find them so easy (in other words little prep work on my side).
Last week my son requested the Man Who Bought a Mountain and while I was going through looking at the activities I notice a bunch of links to videos on YouTube. So I had a quick look and was wonderfully surprised to see what they called Daily Reading Activity Packs – 5 separate packs on the Twinkl site each with a link to a video. So a video a day idea. (The link to the videos are in the paragraphs underneath each activity pack but you can also just search on YouTube).
And the video – as soon as the link opened there was a lovely Twinkl teacher who read the story (they display the story on the screen so the kids can follow along) and they pause and ask the kids questions and get them to think about certain things in the text. We have never tried this with the other eBooks (we always read them together) but I thought why not? Lets just give the first lesson a go. So we tried and my son asked if we could stick with the video lessons for the whole week. We did. And they were all brilliant. My son loved it and happily did all the questions and tasks the Twinkl teacher asked and I must admit I enjoyed sitting and drinking a cup of tea while I listened to the Twinkl teacher take control. (Each video clip is rough 17 – 20 minutes long but the kids do pause to answer questions so it took my son about half an hour each time). And his sister even came and listened to the lessons just for fun (because it is always great to listen to a good story).
I have had a quick look and seen they have done these type of video lessons for a number of their eBooks (have no idea which ones they have done them for and which ones they have not). And I must admit we will try them again. I actually think it is nice to mix it up a bit and do some of the eBooks our old way of reading together and some with these videos.
And as always this eBook comes with activities that you can print out from the Twinkl site. For each daily reading they have a questions (really comprehension type questions about the story) and then normally an extra activity page. Day 4 actually covered Fronted Adverbials (something which my son had not yet done so I was thrilled when I heard the Twinkl teacher explain it and he totally understood it after the lesson and activity).
There are also extra comprehension pages and activity sheets linked to the eBook on the site (just type in The Man who Bought a Mountain and a whole bunch of related pages come up). They have pages like – the label a mountain, the mountain ranges in the world a lovely non-fiction comprehension about a man you actually moved a mountain and a lot more. In the eBook Yash actually mentions how his mountain was created so it could always be a great introduction in how different mountains are created (we have already looked at that).
As always we enjoyed the story and my son really enjoyed having the video lessons.
ofamily learning together 
Pingback: Starting Year 5 resource ideas | ofamily learning together