Literacy 

USING THE TEACHING & LEARNING CYCLE & MENTOR TEXTS IN YEAR 1 & 2

The Year 1 and 2 students, along with their teachers Miss Joplin and Miss Featherstone, have been having lots of fun exploring the story The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. The children have been busy making their own gruffalos and writing about them. They have discussed the story setting and used describing words to write sentences about the deep, dark woods. Have a look!

These types of learning activities are examples of teachers’ use of an evidence-based practice called The Teaching and Learning Cycle. The first phase of the cycle is ‘Building the Field’ which focuses on developing deep content knowledge through language rich experiences. It emphasizes the importance of making meaning and gives students a context in which to learn.

In the next week teachers will be guiding children through the following phases of The Teaching and Learning Cycle;

2. Deconstruction - exploring the purpose, structure and language features of the text

3. Joint Construction - scaffolding and modeling writing strategies

4. Independent Construction - students writing their own narrative

PHONICS IN FOUNDATION

At St James teachers systematically and explicitly teach phonics. In Foundation, Miss Slater has already taught the letters c, a, t, n, i, and p, within the context of common words and using books to create engaging, meaningful learning experiences. The students have been immersed in a wide range of different types of activities which develop understanding of letter-sound relationships.

For example, when learning about the letter a, students have:

• been repetitively exposed to the symbol a, the word ant, an image of an ant and a matching physical action. They have also practiced correct articulation. Together, this creates a multi-sensory ‘memory hook’ for students, to support them in building automatic recall letter-sound correspondences
• listened to a range of stories about ants
• sang songs about ants: ‘The ants go marching…’ 
• located key words and letters within words in Big Books and picture story books
• made ants with spoons and pipe-cleaners (fine motor)
• created a list of words that contain the letter a making an ‘a’ sound like in ant (We know letters can make different sounds within different words)
• practiced oral blending and segmenting activities
• practiced letter formations by tracing, copying and using playdough
• used their growing knowledge of letters and sounds to write consonant-vowel-consonant words such as; ant, cat, tin, tap
• made a class book about ants using The Language Experience Approach, where they drew and articulated their sentence idea, which was scribed by Miss Slater

RECOUNT WRITING IN YEAR 3/4

Camp - By Hugh H

        On Wednesday afternoon the whole of 3/4B met at St James and prepared to go to Zoo Snooze. At 5 o’clock we hopped on the bus. The parents waved from the footpath. It was about half an hour's drive, but luckily Jack, Saxon, Toby and Ethan and I kept everyone entertained with our singing skills. 

        After the long drive to the zoo we all hopped off the bus, got our luggage and waited for the zoo keepers to come out. They took about 15 minutes to come out to the zoo gate entrance. While we were waiting we took some photos of ourselves with the cameras some of us brought with us. After, they finally came out and we loaded our luggage onto a ute. There were two zookeepers, Brie and Luke. Brie was the one that drove the ute in with our luggage. After Brie drove our stuff into the zoo Luke took us in to see our tents. After that, we were all given our tent groups. I was with Harry, Nic and Ethan in our tent cocoon. Once we were done with the tents we were going to get put in our endangered species group. I was in the Tasmanian Devil group with Toby, Nic, Iris and Ethan. We did challenges in our groups. The first challenge we got a clipboard with questions about the zoo. The winning team didn’t have to unpack the bags off the ute and also got cordial. Unfortunately, my team didn’t win and we had to unpack everything from the ute. 

        After that challenge came dinner. We all headed down to the cafeteria to eat. For dinner was a sausage, bread, meat, salad, corn and potatoes. After dinner we went to the tents to get warmer clothes for the night walk. After we were nice and warm in our cosy clothes we started the walk. Our first animal stop was to see the snow leopard called Mieshka. We couldn’t see her though so we moved onto the lions. They did some loud roaring and were sleeping too. After that we moved onto the zebras, which were still awake. Then we followed a spooky path down to an elephant enclosure where we saw an elephant called Manjai. After looking at Manjai for ten minutes the zookeepers decided it was time to go back to- the tents. We were all kind of disappointed about that but they weren’t changing their minds. After that we jumped into our tents, talked for a bit then went to sleep.

        We woke up at about 6.30am but we weren’t allowed out of our tents until 7am so we started packing. At 7am we left our tents to have breakfast, we got a bag with cereal, a cheese roll and a box of fruit. After breakfast we went out, to go for a tour of the zoo. We got to see Manjai again and also Manjai’s family. I also loved the butterfly house which was super warm and filled with butterflies. I also enjoyed seeing the koalas which were super cute and fluffy and the tigers too. But the thing I loved the most was the seals and penguins. The seals were putting on a show for us and the penguins were so cute.

        After that, we had to leave the zoo. It was sad because I had such a fun time and I’m looking forward to going back.

THE END

Olivia Quinlan

Literacy Leader/Learning and Teaching Leader