Curriculum in Focus

Oz Lit Teacher and Mentor Texts 

On Friday 3rd June we were very fortunate to have Narissa Leung attend OGPS and present professional learning on the 6 + 1 Traits of Writing. Riss has a lifelong goal to ‘hook’ everyone into reading and writing. In her words, literacy opens doors.

Riss is a Literacy consultant who started her company ‘Oz Lit Teacher’ because she was annoyed by the number of American mentor texts that were being used in Australian schools. These books had American spelling and themes that were not always relevant to our kids. Oz Lit Teacher was born to help teachers learn more about the incredible Australian literature that we have.

Her presentation to staff inspired us to look closely at Australian authors and the wonderful books they have written. She reiterated the importance of using mentor texts in our classrooms to teach students about reading and writing.

What is a mentor text?

Mentor texts for writing are pieces of text that teachers can hold up as examples of good writing. A mentor text can be a single sentence or an entire book. It can be something written by the teacher, a student, a published author or someone else entirely. They allow us to show our students what quality writing looks like rather than telling them.

Mentor texts in reading are books or pieces of text we can use to model the use of specific reading strategies such as decoding, predicting, inferring, or even discussing character traits. 

At OGPS we have and use mentor texts on a regular basis but we would like to build up our bank of them. We have some in classrooms and Sally has many of them in the Library, which our students love to borrow. 

This year some of the money from the school Library Fund will go towards purchasing new mentor texts. If you would like to donate to the Library Fund, please contact Lara at the school office. If you would like to purchase a mentor text and have your family name inscribed inside the cover, please let me know so I can provide some titles for you to choose from. Any contribution is greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Kerryn McKeon

Learning Specialist 

Kelas Bahasa Indonesia

Ketentuan ini, kami menpelajari binatang-binatang (kelas 1-2) dan tawar menawar (kelas 3-6).

~This term, we are studying animals in Years 1 & 2 and bargaining in Years 3 - 6

Contoh:

Try it at home: Years 1 & 2: This week we read the story “Di mana ayam merah?” Which is a similar book to a well-known children’s favourite, “Where is the green sheep?” Can you make your own book with the list of animals above? Di mana _(colour)_ _(animal)?

Years 3 - 6: Practise your market roleplay with someone at home. It should be posted to your SeeSaw account!

Terima Kasih, 

Bu Kate dan Bu Chelsea