The Learning Zone 

Up Leveling Vocabulary.

HAVE YOU NOTICED STAFF WEARING A YELLOW BADGE WITH A WORD ON IT?

An important element of being a balanced reader is having an extensive vocabulary to draw on. In an effort to expand our students' vocabulary the teachers this week are wearing a word that they want to add to their tier 2 tier 3 vocabulary.  Teachers and students have been constantly asking ‘what does your word say?’, ‘what does your word mean?’, ‘can you use it in a sentence?’, ‘can you spell it without looking? By referring to the word throughout the week it should be embedded into our vocabulary. On Friday, it will be added to our VCOP wall. The word is on a yellow piece of paper as that is the colour for vocabulary in VCOP.

Next week all students in stage 2 and 3 will be guided by their  teacher to choose a word that they are not familiar with from either a book they have read or a word they need in their writing. Then they will write it on a yellow card and wear it for the week, adding it to the class VCOP wall by the end of the week. 

State 1 and Early Stage 1 will then start wearing a word a week in week 5.

Important Facts

• Students entering Kindergarten use to have a base vocabulary of 48 000 words ( Tier 1 words - everyday words that don't need to be defined.)
• Gaps are starting to appear and we now have some students starting Kindergarten with as little as 13 000 words.
• After Year 3 most students can decode on average 25 - 30% more  words than they can understand. 
• From Year 3 on the main limiting factor for the majority of children is vocabulary, not reading mechanics.

Year 5 Big Write

Year 5 got into the spirit of the movies today, writing a personal review of their favourite movie. To help them with their inspiration there were some costume props and of course some popcorn!

We have seen some fabulous writing from the students!