Literacy News 

Our reading and writing programs are now in full swing. In our regular level planning sessions, we have been focusing on targeting teaching to the needs of students of different abilities, and we have also been looking at modelled writing at the start of each lesson.

Phonics in Context

This week, the Junior School Teachers participated in another professional development session learning about phonics in context. One of the activities we looked at was deciding which of the words in a ‘word bag’ belong in the same word family based on a shared meaning and structure. What do you think?

We decided that ‘shop’ looks similar, but does not have the same base of ‘hop’ that most of the other words do.

‘Jump’ has the same meaning, but doesn’t look the same. 

All the other words are part of the ‘hop’ family.

From there, we looked at a matrix showing the ‘hop’ family:

This kind of word inquiry is a great way for students (and adults) to build an understanding of how words work and of different spelling patterns.

We had a great conversation after this about why you need to add an extra marker ‘p’ into ‘hopped’ and ‘hopping’ to make them different from ‘hoped’ and ‘hoping’.

We are looking forward to leading student through similar word inquiries to see what they discover. 

As always, if you’d like further information about our literacy programs, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards

Annie Facchinetti

Literacy Leader