Year 1 Bulletin

Reading

Learning Intention:

To pause and think, ‘What might this character be thinking or saying here?’

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.

Fluency:

This week's fluency involved doing Choral reading, which involves reading short sentences as a class. Focusing on using expressions based on what sort of sentence - question, comment or statement.

Whole:

In reading, our classes learned how to make inferences—that means using clues from the story and pictures to figure out what a character might be thinking or feeling, even if the words don’t say it directly.

We used a comic called “First Day of School!” that showed three children experiencing a classroom moment. We modelled, practising stopping to look closely at the characters’ faces, body language, and actions to understand what might be going on inside their heads.

We modelled how to do this by thinking aloud for each character to the students:

Benjamin was staring at a blank page. We talked about how he might feel confused or nervous.
Lily noticed Benjamin but didn’t smile. We decided she might feel unsure about whether to help.
The new boy who walked in looked surprised and nervous. We guessed he might be wondering if anyone would talk to him.

Even though the story didn’t tell us their feelings, we learned how to be thoughtful readers by pausing, observing, and imagining ourselves in the characters’ shoes.

We then allowed students to infer what they believe the character could have been thinking and feeling. Here are some examples below:

Small:

After our whole, the students split off into their reading groups and completed the activities below. They complete 1 activity per session, and each activity has a focus which you can see in the images below.