Literacy News
The students at St Joseph's are thriving when it comes to Reading and Writing.
In the last few weeks, I have had a steady stream of visiting students at my office, showcasing their Literacy Learning. Being led by their wonderful teachers, students across the school are being offered opportunities to learn at their own level. With many students being exposed to concepts that are usually addressed in the following year!
Please enjoy this snapshot of the fantastic work happening across the school!
Junior School
Our Prep students are becoming Reading and Writing superstars. Last week I was invited in by the students to watch them participating in their 'Paired Partner Reading'. PPR happens in all junior classrooms and is an opportunity for all students to develop their reading fluency. How impressive is it that our youngest learners are calling themselves 'readers' after only 59 days at school.
Lots of daily dictation and sentence work has been happening in both Prep classrooms. It's been wonderful to see the children excelling with their spelling, spacing and letter formation!
The Year One and Two students have been busy with their daily MSL, reading and writing lessons. I was able to sneak a photo of our Year One teachers, Mr Jansson and Miss Nardella engrossed in their daily explicit groups while the children were busy at work!
The children have been learning about structures of narratives with a particular focus on fairy tales. Exploring classic fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, the children have been learning how to add adjectives to make their writing more interesting.
Building on this, the Year Two students have been practicing using paragraphs to organise their narratives. It's only Term Two and they are already looking toward Year Three standards! Well done Year Two!
We have also had some students completing the enrichment prompts and exploring the use of prefixes and suffixes in their MSL lessons.
Middle School
Over the last few weeks, I have had the pleasure of working closely with the Year Three and Four teachers to plan the shared reading lessons. Not missing a beat, the children have been developing their content knowledge about water and access to this resource. Students in the middle school have increased their vocabulary and understanding about how lucky we are to readily have access to clean, safe water.
Senior School
The students in Year Five and Six have begun the term with a deep dive into their class novels. In Year Five, the novel 'A Boy Who Stepped Through Time' has been the focus, coupled with the reading of myths and legends to complement the children's unit on narratives. All the children have been engrossed in the story, as they follow Perry back in time to Ancient Rome.
In Year Six, the children have just begun the novel 'A Long Walk to Water'. Before delving into the story, the children spent weeks learning about, analysing and critically thinking about Africa, with a particular focus on Sudan (the setting of the novel). In the words of the Year Six students 'without all that learning, we would never have known about the Dinka Tribes or just how sacred cows are to the Sudanese people - it's helped make the book make sense'.
They are now dipping their toe into Year Seven as they unpack, and find evidence of, the themes of survival, kinship and bravery within the novel.
