Literacy

John Scollo

Term 3 - Literacy

Welcome back to Term 3! I hope you all had a fantastic and restful break. This newsletter entry should help you become familiar with what learning your child will be focussing on in Literacy and help answer some questions you may have. As you may have noticed on our Term 3 Parent Calendar, our 2025 Art Show and Writers’ Festival Launch will be celebrated on the same day – Thursday the 11th September. To acknowledge and celebrate the students’ art and writing masterpieces, our Gym will be transformed into an Art Gallery, whilst our passageways will become a Writers’ Gallery. 

This year our Art Show theme is ‘Art Through the Ages’ and our Writers’ Festival theme is ‘A Journey Through Time’. Greenvale Primary is experiencing a blast from the past as well as a glimpse into the future! 

Every student has begun their journey towards publishing a written text for the Writers’ Festival. Each cohort will be working hard to plan, draft and publish the following pieces of writing: 

Foundation: A narrative about Toys over Time 

Year 1: An information report about Dinosaurs 

Year 2: A narrative about a mysterious door that leads them into the future 

Year 3: A descriptive piece about life as a convict 

Year 4: A comic strip that describes dinosaurs landing at Greenvale Primary  

Year 5: A diary entry about travelling back in time to the olden days 

Year 6: An information report about Inventions. 

In Reading, each cohort will be focussing on: 

Foundation: Students will be learning about digraphs and suffixes this term. They will also focus on synonyms and antonyms to help grow their vocabulary and understanding of texts read.

Year 1: Students will be continuing with the implementation of our phonics program Little Learners Love Literacy. This program is complimented with the use of picture story books, big books, and non-fiction texts. They will develop their ability to retell a text using the main events, pictures from the text as well as the characters and setting. Students will also be working on developing their comprehension skills by discussing the text and answering a variety of literal and inferential questions based on their reading.

Year 2: Students will be reading and completing a novel study on, ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E.B. White. There will be a strong focus on building comprehension skills such as answering literal and inferential questions as well as building their vocabulary by learning about a range of Tier 1, 2 and 3 words.

Year 3: Students will be reading texts every week and completing a short response to each of these texts. They will learn to find and identify key words to help them answer literal and inferential questions. 

Year 4: Students will be reading and completing a novel study on ‘Slime’ by David Walliams. They will be learning to make connections between self, text and world, inferencing and building their vocabulary.

Year 5: Students will be reading and completing a novel study on, ‘I Survived the Destruction of Pompeii, AD 79’, by Lauren Tarshis. They will be developing their comprehension skills by focusing on strategies such as Cause & Effect, Comparing & Contrasting, Visualising and Summarising.

Year 6: Students will be reading and completing a novel study on ‘Crater Lake’ by Jennifer Killick. They will be focusing on making text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections as well as inferencing.

Please remember to check Compass regularly to stay informed of the learning that is happening in your child’s class, as well as upcoming information about Book Week and Writers’ Festival.

We can’t wait to share our gallery of student work with you!

John Scollo

On behalf of the English Strategic Action Team