Literacy

This term in Reading, our mentor texts will continue to integrate our Inquiry focus for the term, ‘how can we use the Earth’s resources sustainably?’. Students will be exposed to a range of non-fiction texts relating to this topic, with a particular focus on expanding their use of comprehension strategies. In particular, we will be focusing on:

• Continuing to develop student ability to understand the meaning of unknown words and use topic-specific vocabulary in their writing.
• Identifying the main idea or theme of a text, as well as key details which support those ideas.
• Synthesising knowledge of a text to give succinct summaries and determining importance of information within a text.
• Initiating conversations about a text and posing questions that reflect their curiosities about the topic. 

This term in Writing, students will:

• Build on their knowledge of paragraph structures and move towards planning and writing longer pieces of work which include multiple paragraphs.
• Explore and experiment with literary devices commonly used in narrative writing - including triples, dialogue, similes, metaphors, and onomatopoeia.

Other Literacy foci for the term will include:

• Developing student ability to segment words into syllables and recognise the seven different syllable types.
• Beginning work on contraction words, such as don’t, can’t, etc. 
• Instruction in reading and writing consonant digraphs and trigraphs, silent letters and double letters.
• Instruction in handwriting to support the formation of legible, correctly-spaced letters with correct entry and exit points.
• Instruction on spelling a range of high-frequency words.