Reading & Writing  

To begin our school year we have been engaging in testing with students to understand their sound knowledge. As part of Literacy in Term 1, students will be looking at the following sounds:

Sounds we will have a focus on are:

Students will explicitly learn and practise short vowel sounds /a/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, alongside common consonant patterns and spelling conventions that support accurate decoding and encoding. This includes the FLSZ doubling rule (ff, ll, ss, zz), vowel–consonant patterns such as –all, –oll, –ull, and consonant digraphs ck and sh. Instruction will also target more complex phoneme–grapheme relationships, including voiced and unvoiced th, wh and ph, and the nasal digraph ng. Through explicit, cumulative teaching and repeated practise, students will strengthen their ability to recognise, decode, spell, and apply these sound–spelling patterns in reading and writing, supporting fluent and confident literacy development.

As part of our home learning, students will be engaged in reading some simple decodable passages.

Over this term we will also enjoy books such as ‘Ask Aunty', by Aunty Munya Andrews and we will be exploring many of Aesop’s Fables. During these units, the students will be

 exploring themes such as: 

• Aboriginal seasonal knowledge
• caring for the environment
• cultural awareness and respect
• diversity of knowledge

• empathy and understanding others’ feelings
• consequences of choices and actions
• problem-solving and wisdom.

We will continue to work on handwriting in both our reading and writing lessons.

Writing 

For writing, children will be learning to write a sequential description as well as a Narrative. They will learn about characters, settings, problems and solutions, comparing and contrasting morals and correctly identifying pronouns.