Prep Bulletin

Learning Intention: To use sound and letter clues to sequence words. 

Learning Experience Overview:

Our first Big Idea this term is exploring the statement “When I experience emotions, I feel and react in ways that affect myself and others around me”. Students are unpacking the Big Idea by exploring key questions such as ‘What are feelings and emotions?’ and ‘Why do I feel in different ways?’

Before this learning experience, we read the book ‘The Colour Monster’. We used the comprehension strategy Think and Explain (see poster below) when reading the book. We looked at different pages to discuss what we thought about each picture and explained why we think that. Students discussed the different emotions that were associated with each colour displayed by the Colour Monster throughout the book. 

This learning experience was broken up into different parts:

Explore: As a class, we discussed the features that make up a sentence such as capital letters and full stops. The teacher read the sentence “Colour the Monster me. Inside” and the students noticed this did not make sense. As a class we discussed the clues we can use to sequence a sentence correctly. This included full stops, capital letters and sound and letter clues. The teacher then modelled how to sequence the sentence correctly and reread the correct sentence “The Colour Monster inside me.” Students then had a go at sequencing the sentence independently at the top of their page, then drew their own Colour Monster. They were encouraged to use colours that reflected their feelings for that day.

Enabling: Students matched the sentence to a correctly sequenced version on their page.

Extending: The teacher cut the initial sounds off the words in the sentence and students had to sequence the sentence using letter and sound clues.

In this learning experience, students worked towards:

• Using letter and sound clues to sequence a sentence
• Noticing sentence features such as capital letters and full stops
• Identifying emotions and feelings within themselves

Examples of students’ work:

What you can do now to continue the learning at home from this experience:

• Discuss different feelings and emotions we experience in our school day and how it is normal to feel many different emotions in one day.
• Discuss the features of a sentence (capital letters at the start and a full stop at the end)
• Cut up a sentence from a magazine or newspaper and have students sequence them correctly.