BBPS Life: Reading

Prep / Grade 1

We have launched our author study in Prep and Grade 1. Our chosen author, Julia Donaldson is well known for her fantastic, popular, rhyming books, including ‘The Gruffalo’, ‘Room on the Broom’ and ‘Stick Man’. Author studies help students build their reading and writing connection, and critical thinking skills by comparing different texts, analysing illustrations and unpacking interesting vocabulary. 

Language Comprehension - Explicit teaching sessions focus on using Julia Donaldson’s stories as mentor texts, where we analyse grammar, sentence structure and tiered vocabulary. We will develop our comprehension, with a focus on retelling through puppet shows and written summaries. We can’t wait to become authors ourselves!

Word Recognition - our early readers are progressing brilliantly with their phonemic awareness (knowledge of sounds), building a toolkit of varied word attack skills to decode texts. We continue to explicitly teach a range of accuracy and fluency strategies through small group teacher-led level reading groups, as well as through 1:1 reading conferences. Daily phonics’ focus is reinforced through the reading process as well as our spelling program. 

Grade 2

Language Comprehension - This term we are reading a range of texts linked to our inquiry, which is exploring sustainability and the affect of soft plastics on our local beach and understanding our environmental footprint. Daily whole class reading sessions develop our critical thinking skills by practising using prior knowledge, questioning techniques and inferring. Analysis of sentence structure (such as use of paragraphs) and emotive language supports our readers to make connections to the purpose of persuasive texts to convince an audience to agree with us! This week we read ‘The Wonders of the World’ , which excited our learners and their interest in this area.

Word recognition - We have been building our rich vocabulary, and analysing text for nouns, verbs and adjectives, adding to the list of words we know by sight. With a focus on vowel digraphs and suffix endings, as code breakers we have been hunting for words as we read to practise our knowledge of letter-sound combinations.

Grades 3 and 4

Deep Comprehension - this term the Three Four Hub teachers have been engaging with Leading Literacy Professional Development at the Victorian Academy of Teaching.  We have been researching the latest teaching approaches towards improving comprehension skills. With the majority of our students working at the strong-exceeding level, this is of particular importance to ensure we maintain high growth by developing critical thinking skills. 

Using the text My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlings we have been exploring comprehension skills around synthesis, making connections between chapters, foreseeing the future chapters which are back in time. We have also been focusing on expanding vocabulary and explicitly teaching new words with a strong connection to colloquialism through this book. Our inquiry unit is Australian History and first contacts so this book is a throughline to our inquiry units and perspective writing which we will be delve into once our Olympic Unit of writing is finished. 

Word recognition and further language comprehension development is supported through small group reading sessions - Reciprocal Reading is when students read an at level text with their group and discuss and analyse text structure and vocabulary. 

Later on in the term we will be teaching our students the skills to be able to successfully conduct book club throughout term 4. We explicitly teach the roles of book club so that children can successfully engage in group discussions around a text supporting deeper comprehension.

Grades 5 and 6

Reading in the 5/6 area comprises two parts. The first part is a whole class explicit teaching focus on language comprehension through the use of different types of texts. This term students have been interpreting, analysing and evaluating different types of poems. Students have explored vocabulary (figurative language), sentence syntax, and poetry structure through mentor poets such as Maya Angelou, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Frost. Students have been supported to draw connections between themes and concepts including identity, racism, and representation of nature - past, present and future. 

The second part this term is Book Club, also known as Literature Circles. Students have begun to delve into their chosen books, completing a Book Club Response sheet which asks them to draw on critical comprehension strategies such as questioning, inferring, making connections and synthesising. Students are given a book both at their reading and comprehension level and tailored to student interest. Each group meets weekly to unpack their ideas and themes, guided by a teacher. This supports the 5/6 curriculum by exposing students to imaginative texts, exploring metacognition and allowing for discussion about different themes and interpretations of texts. 

Elliot (5BM) "We meet around in a circle with our book and with our response sheet ready. Our response sheet has words that puzzle us, words that are interesting, a connection and a reaction and a prediction, inference and a question. We take turns to share something from our response sheet. We are reading As Fast As I can by Penny Tangey. It is about a girl called Vivian, who wants to go to the olympics. My favourite thing about book club is reading a book that I wouldn't pick for myself. "

 Other great learning around the school

100 Days for Prep; Olympic athlete drawing in Visual Arts; Researching in The Hub;  buddies exploring different country's flags; Grade 6 analysing medal tallies for Mathematics.