Reading & Spelling   

Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon

Our central text this term is the wonderful story, Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon. We will be reading this together to explore the themes of the story and the world Yirra lives in. We aren't just reading the words; we’re "collecting" them! We will be identifying interesting or new words from the book to help the children expand their descriptive language and express themselves more clearly.

Paired Fluency

We will continue participating in Paired Fluency this term. Reading is more than just getting the words right; it’s about flow and expression. In our Paired Fluency sessions, students will work together to practice reading aloud. This helps them find their "reading voice," improves their pacing, and builds the confidence to read more complex texts with ease.

Spelling & Word Work

We will be looking 'under the hood' of the English language to see how words are built. This term, we will focus on:

• Plural Nouns: Learning the different ways we turn one thing into many (it’s not always just adding an ‘s’!).
• Syllabification: Breaking words into "beats" or syllable types to make spelling longer words much easier.
• The Power of Prefixes & Suffixes: Discovering how adding bits to the start (un-, pre-, re-) or the end (-ly) of a word completely changes its meaning.
• Spelling Rules & Patterns: We will be mastering some of those tricky rules, such as:
  • The sounds of t soft c and g (for example, dance or cage) vs hard c and g (for example, cat or garden)
  • The ck/k/c rule (knowing exactly which "k" sound to use at the end of a word).
  • Exploring vowel patterns like ar and a.