Literacy
Melanie Pizzonia
St Raphael's School
The Importance of Picture Story Books
Within our classrooms picture story books play an enormous part in helping to develop literacy skills. Along with pure enjoyment for the children, picture story books help to develop language skills, build vocabulary, increase comprehension and increases visual thinking. Despite some misconceptions, picture story books are not just for early readers. Older readers or even adults can get as much out of reading picture story books as a younger reader.
Reading activity: Read a picture story book as a family and discuss the main events, characters and the the best parts.
Building Language Skills – When reading through picture books during story time, at home or in the classroom, children can practice sounding out the language while adults introduce and explain new and interesting words. The rhythm and rhyme of picture books makes them easy to understand and fun to read aloud, allowing children to learn words quickly.
Inspiring Visual Thinking - Illustrations in a picture book help children understand what they are reading, allowing new readers to analyze the story. If children are having difficulty with the words, the illustrations can help them figure out the narrative, which can increase their comprehension.
Increasing Engagement – Picture books allow teachers and parents to spend time discussing the story, pictures and words. This gives young readers confidence and allows them to talk about what they see on the page, what happened in the story, what the characters are doing and which events have unfolded.
NAPLAN - Year 3 and 5
NAPLAN is a national literacy and numeracy assessment of students in Year 3, 5, 7 and 9. Students sit this in May each year and in 2022, St. Raphael's NAPLAN assessment will move to the online platform. NAPLAN assesses the literacy and numeracy skills that students are learning through the school curriculum and is just one aspect of our school's assessment and reporting process.
Please find further information regarding NAPLAN here.