Year 1 Bulletin

Reading

Learning Experience Overview: Each week, students participate in four reading sessions. During these sessions, we conduct four whole-class lessons that focus on specific reading strategies. We choose two key strategies to explore across the week. Each strategy is taught twice—once through a teacher-led modelled lesson, and once through a shared session where students actively participate and demonstrate their understanding.

Following the whole-class instruction, students rotate through four small-group activities, completing a different task each day. While students are engaged in their group work, we also conduct guided reading sessions with individuals or small groups. These sessions are targeted to support each student’s specific reading needs.

Learning Intention:  To use the strategy of looking at the vowels and asking, “Do these letters slide together or represent one sound?” 

Fluency: This week's fluency involved doing word work on their whiteboards where students added suffixes (‘s’, ‘ing’, ‘ed’) to 3 list words each day.

Whole: In reading, our classes learned how to look at words in a text that contains vowels which students will then ask themselves if the vowels in this word slide together (which means saying each vowel sound in a sequence) or do they merge and make one sound

This lesson was a shared thinking session where the students were participating in the discussions we read ‘If I Built a School’ by Chris Van Dusen. While reading a page we encourage students to look out for words and order them in a table presented on the whiteboard. Students were working out whether the vowel sounds they highlighted were listed under Vowels as the first sound, Vowel is not the first sound, do they sound together, or does the vowel sound split.

Small: 

Students continued along with their current rotation activity in their corresponding reading groups. 

Prompts: 

• Do you see vowels that go together in this word?
• Try more than one way-break between the vowels, slide the sounds together, use the one sound for the vowel sequence-to see which one is correct.
• You put those two letters together to make one sound and you were able to read the word!

How you might like to continue learning at home:

To help your child continue practicing this reading strategy at home, get your child to look for specific vowel sounds that either slide together, represent one sound, don't use the first vowel or if the vowels are split when saying the sound in the word.

Kind regards,

Rosanna, Jarryd and Stef

The Year 1 Team

rosanna.caruso@education.vic.gov.au

jarryd.lamb@education.vic.gov.au

stephanie.lampard@education.vic.gov.au