Literacy News

We love learning at SKiPPs and we love celebrating all things Literacy! Throughout this year, some of the things that we will participate in and celebrate include:

• Short Story Competition through KidsNews – optional and open to all students in June.
• KidsNews Spelling Bee– optional and open to Years 3-6 and generally held in September.
• Book Week – 17th -23rd August - Whole school celebrations include reading many of the nominated books for the year, a live performance of one of the short listed books, voting on personal favourites from the nominated list and our famous annual Book Week Parade.

Reading at SKiPPS

Classroom Libraries

Every learning space at SKiPPS is equipped with a classroom library. The books are all chosen with ‘high quality’ literature in mind. We deliberately purchase particular books with a focus on high quality authors and a variety of fiction, non fiction, picture story books and novels. These books are readily available for every student to enjoy. 

Riss Leung from Oz Lit Teacher tells us that equitable access to books promotes reading achievement and motivation and that the quality and range of books that are available has a strong relationship with students’ reading comprehension.

If you are cleaning out your shelves and have books to move on, we will graciously accept donations of pre-loved books that are suitable for our classrooms. Please bring to the office or see Jac in Foundation to discuss further.

Helping your child to read

Nightly reading

Please support our love of reading at school by reading to, and with your child/children each night. Celebrate all efforts, successful and challenging. 

The following information is from the Department of Education Website under the section ‘Information to Parents’. You can read more on the link here.

Reading together

Reading should start in the first few months after birth. Even if as an adult you don’t read often, or don’t particularly like reading, it is important that you spend this valuable time with your child to stimulate their language development, and to encourage their love of reading. Reading together is a valuable thing to do. Reading increases your child’s vocabulary, expands your child’s understanding of the world, and gives them confidence when using language. Reading is also an important way to make the link between spoken words and written words.

Here are some general tips:

• Visit your local library to select and read books together, and to attend story time sessions. Library story time sessions are a great way to share the joy of reading with your child in a group setting.
• Encourage your child to select books, magazines, catalogues, or multimedia stories according to their interests.
• Set aside time for reading every day. Reading before bedtime is a good habit to get into.
• Position yourself so your child can see the words and the pictures.
• Run your finger across the page with each word to help your child identify and remember words and sounds.
• Share wordless picture books to develop imagination, ideas and vocabulary by naming and describing things in pictures.
• Look for rhyme, rhythm or repetition in books. This will help develop your child’s love of language.
• When reading to your child, read stories with expression, or try putting on the voices of characters. This will help make reading fun.
• Point out important features about a book – for example, the words and pictures, the front cover, the spine, the contents page, or the title.
• Discuss the meaning of unknown words that children hear and read. Explore words using a dictionary. Have a discussion and ask questions about interesting words you find, for example, 'It says here she "tumbled" down the hill. How do you think she went down the hill?' It says here 'He read a "good" book. What is another word we could use besides good?'
• Encourage your child to take over some or all of the reading if they feel confident.
• If your child is confident with their reading, allow them to read without interruption. Fluency is gained with confidence. Mistakes can be discussed after a block of reading, or in subsequent readings.
• Allow your child to read at their own pace. Model good pace when you read to them.
• Give your child the opportunity to re-read books.
• Read and talk to your child in family languages and encourage others who speak different languages to use these with your child.
• Let your child see you and other family members read for pleasure. It is especially important for boys to see the men they care about reading.
• Encourage your child to join the Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge, which runs each year from March to September. Participating early childhood services and schools will register your child – otherwise you can register your child at the Premiers Reading Challenge.

Writing at SKiPPS

Each term, every student will participate in a Big Write. This is a timed piece of writing where the students are given a prompt to help initiate an idea for their writing. 

The prompt for the writing task will be the same for every student in the school however, the responses will all be unique as students can choose where the prompt takes them and what type of text response they may choose to write. For example, if students were shown the following images, they may choose to write;

• A narrative about playing with neighbours
• A instructional piece on how to build a billy cart
• A persuasive piece about playing outside versus playing inside
• A recount of a time you took a risk or tried something new and adventurous.

At school, we will provide the students with time to discuss and share ideas, they will have an opportunity to talk about their ideas, share thoughts, ask questions and think about the goals that they are hoping to achieve through their writing piece.

Big Writes pieces are collected and kept by the classroom teachers. Teachers use these pieces of writing as assessment tasks and will generally provide the student with individual feedback and a personal goal to help them have a purpose for improvement in upcoming pieces. We keep all Big Writes from Prep to Year 6 and present them back to the students when they complete their final year at SKiPPS. It is a very special celebration of growth.

Book Recommendations

Picture Story Book

On A Magical Do-Nothing Day by Beatrice Alemagna

A young girl is stuck inside on a rain day. Whilst mum works the girl is busy playing her video game. She resents her mother for taking the game away and sneaks off with it out into the rain. 

Accidentally dropping the game in the water the girl resorts to looking at the beauty of the natural world around her, and she discovers the pleasure of everything from mud to plants to stones...An enjoyable look at the rainy outdoor world through the eyes of a child. The illustrations in this book are exquisite.

Middle Fiction

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

When a peculiar advertisement appears in the newspaper for children to take part in a secret mission, children everywhere sit a series of mysterious tests. In the end, just four children succeed: Reynie, Kate, Sticky and Constance. They have three things in common: they are all honest, all remarkably talented and all orphans.

They must go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened where the only rule is that there are no rules. There they must work as a team to save not only themselves, but also the world outside the walls …

Interview with Matt Cook, Assistant Principal

What are you reading at the moment?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This is the first time I have read the series of Harry Potter and I am thoroughly enjoying watching the development of characters from the initial book. 

How have you found the fantasy element of the book?

The language is great and really allows me to picture what is going on.

Who is your favourite character in the book?

Ron Weasley, I like the way he has grown from being a young, dorky kid into a funny, confident teenager. Ron is funny, he makes me laugh!

Can you Help us?

With 15 classroom libraries in action, we have an enormous amount of books that require contacting. If contacting books is something that you enjoy, please come and see me! I have loads of contact and a pile of books waiting for you!

You Tube Clip - How to contact books     

THANK YOU!!! 

Jac Morphy

Leading Teacher

Literacy