LITERACY

READING:

Reading Strategies:

The students will continue to focus on the 3 reading strategies of Meaning, Structure and Visual and will be encouraged to integrate all three strategies to assist them when reading.

Meaning-the children think about what the story is about, use the pictures to help predict, ask themselves if their reading makes sense.

Structure - children need to ask themselves if it sounds right, does their reading flow?

Visual- the children use the letters and letter patterns to check their predictions. (Does the word look right?)

Students will continue to develop fluency when reading. Reading fluency is the ability to read accurately, quickly, effortlessly, and with appropriate expression and meaning.

Fluency develops when students

  • hear fluent, expressive reading from you and others reading out loud
  • join in with fluent, expressive reading
  • have the opportunity to practise reading texts multiple times
  • are coached in fluent, expressive reading by you and their peers
  • record their reading and listen to themselves, and do this multiple times with the same text as they personally coach themselves to read more fluently
  • are provided with many opportunities for independent reading.

Comprehension Strategies

Questioning – Literal (the answer is in the story) and Inferential (searching for clues within the story and thinking about the answer).

Retelling – Readers retell the main events in sequence.

Making connections -Readers relate what they read to personal experiences (text-to-self), to information from other text (text-to-text), and to information about the world (text-to-world) in order to enhance understanding of self, text, and life.

Thinking Aloud – this strategy is incorporated in all comprehension strategies and involves ‘thinking aloud’ about the process that is occurring in their mind as they read. This helps the students to monitor their own reading, adjust their thinking and support their understanding of the text.

WRITING:

The genre we will be focusing on this term is RECOUNTS. Students will do this through writing about previous experiences such as their swimming lessons, weekend adventures, the Responsible Pet Ownership Incursion and various experiences they may participate in. The children will also be using their Writer’s Notebooks.

Writer’s Notebooks- This book allows students to choose their own writing topics and styles and explore them without any teacher markings or corrections. The children can bring in seeds or artefacts that will help inspire them to write. These could include; photographs, invitations, magazine/newspaper clippings, tickets or advertisements (these can be brought in throughout the term)

RECOUNTS describe events that have happened to you or other people.

The structure of a RECOUNT is as follows: (Reading or Writing)

TEXT ORGANISATION / DESCRIPTION / LANGUAGE FEATURES
ORIENTATION:
(Setting) / Introduces when and where the event began and who was there / Includes specific participants
eg. My family …..
Past tense
eg. I went, I saw
Nouns and pronouns are used to label people, places and things
eg. Animals, Altona, I, she
Use of action verbs
eg. went, fed, walked,
Conjunctions to link events through time
eg. and, then
Words and phrases which link through time
Eg. First, last, yesterday, after, during
EVENTS: / Tells what happened.
The events are told in sequence.
Details are selected to add interest.
ENDING: / Concluding comments to express a personal opinion or feelings in relation to the events.

INTEGRATED

Our integrated topic for this term is weather and seasons. We will be looking at the different months that makes up each season and typical weather patterns and temperatures for each season.

SPELLING

Students will be explicitly taught the spelling strategies and shown how to use them when writing.

The 3 main spelling strategies are:

The Sound Strategy – identifying the sounds children can hear in words.

The Visual Strategy – remembering how a word looks, breaking words up, remembering the tricky parts

The Meaning Strategy – being able to think about the meaning of a word, what we know about words and the word family they belong to.

Spelling focuses for this term will include:

  • Short vowels (hat, cot, bin)
  • Long vowels (same, like, home)
  • Double letters (oo, ee)
  • Blends (fl, st, tr, gr, bl)
  • Word endings (ing, ed, er, s, y)
  • Onset and rime ( say, play, day)
  • High Frequency Words. These are words which are used most frequently in your child’s reading and writing. The spelling of these words needs to become automatic – they are “heart words – words we know off by heart”.

Students will continue to be involved in activities to support their learning of these words at school and at home (set homework tasks).

MATHEMATICS:

NUMBER & ALGEBRA

  • Revision of writing numbers
  • Extension of basic addition and subtraction using number stories
  • Counting forwards and backwards from 1 – 100 at different starting points.
  • Place Value (ones, tens and hundreds)
  • Making rough estimations and checking answers
  • Division as sharing into equal groups.
  • Basic fractions (whole, half, quarter)
  • Exploring calculators (+=)
  • Combinations of numbers to make whole numbers to 20

MEASUREMENT& GEOMETRY

  • Area (using informal units to measure the area of shapes)
  • Mass (using language such as: holds more, heavier than, lighter than/using informal units)

Revision of

  • Time (understanding, seasons of the year,months of the year, days of the week, day and night, analogue and digital o’clock times)
  • Revision of identifying differences between 2D and 3D shapes.