Learning and Teaching

Novel Studies in Years 3 and 4, and 5 and 6

This term in the Year 3 and 4, and Year 5 and 6 Learning Communities, the students have engaged in a Novel Study. This is part of a Pilot Program that we are a part of through MACS and supports Corpus Christi’s transition to the elements listed in MACS Vision for Learning. 

In Year 3 and 4, the students are studying Matilda by Roald Dahl. 

In Year 5 and 6, the students are studying War Horse by Michael Morpurgo.

As the students read the selected novels as a class, they focus on:

• Comprehension
  • Summarising - stopping occasionally during reading to summarise what the author has said / what the key ideas are
  • Question generation - reading, stopping and asking yourself questions about what you are reading and going back to reread if you can’t answer those questions
  • Question answering - students answer questions posed by the teacher and are given feedback on the correctness
  • Comprehension monitoring - monitoring you comprehension and if you are not understanding a text take charge and try to fix it
  • Text macrostructure - looking for a text’s structure to figure out what the parts are and how they fit together
  • Visualisation - actively try to “see” events described in the text
  • Graphic and semantic organisers - allows students to represent graphically (write or draw) the meanings and relationships of the ideas that underlie the words in the text
  • Cooperative learning - working with other students in a scaffolded way to learn and apply strategies
• Literary Terms and Devices - hyperbole, simile, metaphor, alliteration, 
• Vocabulary 
  • incidental during reading to support text comprehension
  • explicit after reading to support vocabulary development
  • a daily review of previous lessons’ explicitly taught words
• Sentence level writing
  • Sentence expansion - Because, but, so
  • Subordinating conjunctions
  • Sentence types
  • Sentences and fragments
  • Topic sentences and supporting details
  • Appositives
• Text level writing
  • Imaginative - Character and setting, introductory paragraph
  • Imaginative - Action and problem paragraphs
  • Imaginative - Resolution and concluding paragraphs
  • Persuasive - Introductory, Body and concluding paragraphs 

As you can see, our students have been very busy in their Literacy learning. Each day they practice using the vocabulary from the novel in different ways as well as engaging in writing at a sentence or whole text level. 

Matilda

War Horse

Deborah Courtney

Director of Learning and Teaching