Prep Bulletin
Armadale Primary School
A Snapshot into Reading
Learning Experience Overview:
Each week, our Preps participate in four reading rotations, focusing on a range of skills through text, word, letter and sentence activities. These experiences help develop comprehension, fluency, letter recognition and phonemic awareness.
During rotations, the teacher works with a small group to practise their individual reading strategy. These sessions are valuable for understanding where each child is at in their reading, the strategies they are using and the next steps to support their progress.
This week, our activities included a vowel sort, alphabet mats, an alphabet scrapbook page and recording words using word wheels. Your child will bring home their vowel sort to share with you.
What children were asked to do:
During our whole, we focused on identifying short vowel sounds in words. We watched The Short Vowel Song to help us recognise the different vowel sounds and discussed how matching letters to their sounds helps us read words.
Children then practised identifying the middle vowel sound in words, checking the beginning, middle and end to help them read each word before sorting it under the correct vowel letter. Tasks were differentiated to support all learners:
Enabling: the middle letter was pre-filled (cat)
Explore: children identified the missing middle vowel (c_t)
Extending: children used pictures to sound out words without seeing the letters (picture of a cat)
What you can do now to continue the learning at home from this experience:
- Practise segmenting: say a word (bus) and ask your child to stretch out the sounds (b/u/s)
- Practise blending: say the sounds in a simple word (m/a/p) and ask your child to blend them together to work out the word (map)
- Ask your child to identify the middle vowel sound in a word
- Look for words in books, signs or around the house and identify the vowel sounds together
- Continue reading at home 5 nights a week to build confidence, fluency and a love of reading
Prep Team
Alyssa Thermos
Ruby Cohen