Reading is not just about decoding words on a page — it’s about understanding, interpreting, and thinking critically about texts. In our classroom, we use a range of strategies to help students develop deeper comprehension skills. This bulletin outlines how a typical reading lesson is structured and the purpose behind each part of the learning.

Whole

Learning Intention: To use clues from the text to infer a lesson a character has learned.

Modelled or Shared

Fluency

This week in reading fluency, we focused on word association activities to build automaticity and deepen our understanding of key vocabulary connected to our Big Idea. By linking words to their meanings and exploring how they relate to each other, students strengthened their comprehension while practising smooth, expressive reading.

We begin our reading session with either a shared task or a modelled task, where the class explores a text together. This week, we used the picture book The Rabbit Listened. Depending on the text, we either read the book aloud or view a high-quality read-along video, pausing as we go to unpack and discuss the text.

This shared task is called a “shared” lesson because students contribute their ideas, and together we co-construct an understanding of the story. The teacher guides the conversation, adding prompts, highlighting key moments, and recording shared ideas on the board.

Before reading, students are given a sheet of paper divided into five labelled sections:

Character
Action
Character (who is affected)
Response
Lesson

As we read, we pause at key points to allow students to record what they observe. For example:

Character: The rabbit
Action: Listens quietly
Character affected: Taylor
Response: Taylor shares their feelings and begins to feel better
Lesson: Sometimes people just need someone to listen

This strategy encourages students to look beyond the surface of the story and identify the message the author is sharing. We support this thinking by asking questions like:

What clues helped you understand how Taylor was feeling?
What made the rabbit’s actions different from the others?
What might the author be trying to teach us?

This shared approach ensures that all students are part of the conversation and that different interpretations are valued and discussed.

Small Group Rotations: Reinforcing Key Skills

After the whole-class task, students move into small group rotations. These groups are mixed-ability and randomly assigned. Over several sessions, each group completes one rotation at a time before moving on to the next. These tasks provide students with varied opportunities to practise reading-related skills in different formats. A rotation chart is used to keep track of progress.

TEXT Rotation

Learning Intention: To identify instructional language in a procedural text.Students identify instructional verbs in a short procedural text (such as "pour," "press," "cut"). They then follow a simple procedure — planting a seed in an egg carton using soil and instructions — to connect the text to a real-life task.

LETTER Rotation

Learning Intention: To explore letter patterns in vowel teams and how they make words.

Students use word games such as Bananagrams, Scrabble, and Boggle to build and identify words with vowel teams (e.g., "ai", "ea", "ou"). They keep track of their words and refer to a classroom anchor chart that reinforces these spelling patterns.

SENTENCE Rotation

Learning Intention: To explore features of simple and compound sentences.

Students complete a colour-by-numbers activity where each colour represents a type of sentence structure. They use a reference chart to help distinguish between simple and compound sentences as they work.

WORD Rotation

Learning Intention: To understand how prefixes and suffixes change the meaning of root words.

In this station, students play a matching memory game that focuses on how prefixes (e.g., "un-", "re-") and suffixes (e.g., "-ful", "-less") change the meaning of base words. This supports vocabulary development and spelling knowledge.

Explicit Small Group Instruction: Deepening Comprehension

In addition to rotations, students also take part in small, teacher-led groups that focus on one specific reading strategy. These groups are organised by ability level to ensure each student receives targeted support or challenge as needed.

Learning Intention: To use clues from the text to make accurate, evidence-based predictions.

In these sessions, students are guided to make predictions before reading and then revisit their thinking afterwards. They record:

My prediction before reading and why:
Was my prediction accurate? Why or why not?

This explicit instruction helps students justify their thinking using evidence from the text, and it builds important metacognitive skills — thinking about their own thinking.

Allira, Richard, Amy

Year 3/4 Team

Allira.Zeneli@education.vic.gov.au

Richard.Cornell@education.vic.gov.au

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