Premier's Reading Challenge

Congratulations to Christian Stegehuis, Cataleya Muljadi, Rhys O’Brien, Alexis Webb, Sophie Jendra, Michael Conron, Annie McNamee, Liesl Stegehuis, Gemma Russell, Ivy Lacey, Elina O’Brien, Eliza Tracy, Eve Baillie, Grace Hughes and Claire Gadzinski, for successfully completing the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Reading Challenge! We are extremely proud of your commitment and dedication to your reading. The certificates have been signed by The Hon Daniel Andrews MP as well as six former Victorian Premiers’. Well done on an amazing effort!

The Importance of Vocabulary 

Children need to have a rich vocabulary that continually grows through language and literacy experiences, in order to comprehend and construct increasingly complex texts, and engage in oral language for a variety of social purposes. Recently released vocabulary data affirms the crucial link between the words students know and students' ability to use those words to understand what they read. An example of this is if two students were given a reading comprehension passage about basketball and one of the students played basketball regularly, that student will achieve higher results on their test. This is because they are familiar with the language and vocabulary used. Vocabulary is key to reading comprehension. Readers cannot understand what they are reading without knowing what most of the words mean. As children learn to read more advanced texts, particularly from Year Three upwards, they must learn the meaning of new words that are not part of their oral vocabulary.

What can Parents do to Help?

• Read regularly with your child, even when they are older.
• Play word games such as scrabble.
• Remove devices such as phones and IPads, to enjoy rich conversations with your child.
• When on outings together, use the correct technical terminology to describe things.
• Use word morphemes to help explain unfamiliar words. A morpheme is a meaningful part or unit of a word that can't be divided into smaller parts.

COMMON SCIENCE WORDS AND MORPHEMES