English

Familiar reading

Using familiar texts;

  • Read to a friend

  • Read to a book buddy

  • Film yourself on an ipad (Change focus eg fluency and phrasing or reading to punctuation)

  • Checklist bookmark (Who, What, Where, When and Why)

  • Pretend you are a teacher and read to a parent.

Spelling focus

Soundwaves online Students enter this code take854 at www.soundwaveskids.com.au

Strategy

Competence in phonemic awareness is clearly related to success in spelling skills and involves understanding and demonstrating skills in:

  • rhyming.

  • hearing individual sounds in spoken language - phoneme awareness.

  • segmenting.

  • blending.

  • manipulating individual sounds in spoken language.


Activities to support the strategy

Activity 1: beginning-middle-end

Beginning-Middle-End is useful as an extremely brief, whole-class activity.

  • The teacher places the letters of a three- or four-letter word face down so that the students cannot see them and tells the students the word (e.g., dog).

  • The teacher and students sing the following brief song to the tune of “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?”: “Beginning, middle, end; beginning, middle, end/Where is the sound? Where is the sound?/Where’s the d in dog? Where’s the d in dog?/Let’s find out. Let’s find out.”

  • After singing, one student comes forward, picks the position (beginning, middle, or end) that he or she believes the sound is in, and turns around the letter card. If the child reveals the letter d the teacher asks the class, “Does this letter make the d sound?” and confirms, “Yes, it does, doesn’t it? We hear the d sound at the beginning of dog.”

  • Repeat this process for the other two phonemes. It is more engaging if the teacher does not ask for the phonemes in sequence. Middle sounds are more difficult to discern so they should be asked later.

  • Use Beginning – Middle–End one or two times each day during kindergarten and early first grade, selecting words that reinforce the letters that students are studying.

  • Use high frequency words on the blank chart to show a visual letter-phoneme map. Laminate on A3 to use several times a day.

  • Use a Y shaped arrow when two letters make one phoneme and no arrows connecting phonemes that make no sound (e.g. silent ‘e’).

Activity 2: word mapping

Use high frequency words on the blank chart to show a visual letter-phoneme map. Laminate on A3 to use several times a day.

Use a Y shaped arrow when two letters make one phoneme and no arrows connecting phonemes that make no sound (e.g. silent ‘e’).

Activity 3: spelling roll–a–word (ES1 – S2)

Start with the first word in your spelling list. Roll a die and complete the activity for the number you roll. Continue with the rest of your list.

Activity 4: word family garden (ES1 – S2)

Have students help to identify words with the same ending and then display the word families in an attractive manner. Make it possible to add to the display. For example, add new petals to the flowers in the following word family garden.

Apps and interactive programs


Grammar focus: Verbs

Tense

In broad terms the tense will be past, present or future, for example ‘Sarah laughed’, ‘Sarah laughs’, ‘Sarah will laugh’. Tense should be consistently used in texts, that is, if a sentence starts in the past tense it should end in the past tense. However, different tenses can be used in one sentence if there is a specific time shift, for example, He was late and I will get the blame because I gave him the wrong directions.

Verb form

Participles (present participles ending in –ing or past participles such as seen and done) do not locate a verb in time and in standard Australian English they need a finite component to indicate when the event happens. For example, the participle running needs the finite auxiliaries was running (past), is running (present), will be running (future) to indicate when the running occurred. Similarly, although done is a past participle, it can be used with a future tense auxiliary, ‘It will be done later.’ Point out that the verbs to do and to see are irregular verbs because the past tense (did or saw) is not formed by adding –ed.

This distinction is difficult for students who speak Aboriginal English or a working class dialect where it is normal to say, He done it and I seen it with me own eyes instead of He did it and I saw it with my own eyes.

NB: Participles ending in –ing without auxiliaries can be used as adjectives and be participants in sentences, for example, She was a cleaning lady. Cleaning was her job.

Verbs occur both as single words and as verb groups. Verb groups can contain two or more verbs and are sometimes called complex/compound verbs. They can also include non–finite verbs (for example, to jump in ‘is going to jump’).

Metalanguage

Students in Kindergarten can begin using terms such as verb, action verb, thinking verb, saying verb, past present and future to describe language. Terms can be modified to suit the cognitive development of students. For example ‘auxiliary verbs’ can be referred to as ‘helping verbs’. They help with telling when something happened!

For example:

  • she has arrived = arrived is the main verb. Has is the auxiliary.

  • I am leaving = leaving is the main verb. Am is the auxiliary.

Activities to support the strategy

Activity 1: develop text-based play boxes for action strategies to develop language

The play boxes should be based around a theme and contain a variety of tactile resources for acting out stories as well as fiction and factual picture books. Develop a set of questions for adults to use to develop students' spoken language while they are interacting with the play materials and books – make sure the questions range from concrete fact, (What did ...), to thinking about (What do you think is ...), to more analytical (Why do you think she ...) and beyond the here and now (What do you think would happen if ...). The resources might include puppets, dress ups for role play, small toys, building blocks or other appropriate play materials. Adults encourage students to talk like the characters in the books while they are playing.

Activity 2: encourage students to talk about picture posters or texts

Use open ended questions to get students to talk about how texts are worded. Get students to identify the verb by asking for example, What did crocodile do?” If students use the present tense in reply do not correct them but scaffold the next answer by saying, “Yes, he danced, and where did he dance?” This gives students the word they need to answer, “He danced around the fire.” If they only answer “around the fire”, then ask again, “What did he do?” to get the full answer.

Activity 3: encourage students to draw before they write

Drawing is a skill students bring to school and it assists them to make the transition to the new skill of writing if it is based on their current skills of drawing and talking. Kindergarten students who are reluctant to write are often willing to draw a picture. Students can then be encouraged to tell someone about their picture and will be willing to write that down. The picture also reminds students about what they want to write. Asking students questions about what is happening in their picture can help them to identify more interesting verbs and asking when it happened, or when it will happen, can assist students to use a variety of tenses. Teachers can model this by drawing a picture of what they did last weekend and writing a sentence in the past tense or draw a picture of what they will do next week and model a sentence in the future tense.

Activity 4: use sentence maker strips

While students are writing their stories you can provide them with basic words on strips of card. Have these words available for students in their own tote tray or in labelled pockets on a wall hanging. Students select the words they want to use and place them in order on card holders (like bigger versions of those used to hold scrabble tiles). They can then read the sentence to see if it makes sense before they write it down.

If students tend to use irregular participles like 'seen' and 'done' without auxiliaries, avoid the use of the spoken version by always including the auxiliary, for example, has seen/ have seen on the same card and providing the simple past tense saw as an alternative. Regular verbs can be written on one card and the possible endings for different tenses or verb agreement can be separate, for example, jump/ s/ ed/ ing as well as the separate auxiliary verbs.

Activity 5: 8 ways of learning for Aboriginal students

Consider how you can include any of the following 8 Ways of Learning for Aboriginal students in your teaching strategies:

  1. story sharing: approaching learning through narrative.

  2. learning maps: explicitly mapping/ visualising processes.

  3. non-verbal: applying intra'personal and kinaesthetic skills to thinking and learning.

  4. symbols and images: using images and metaphors to understand concepts and content.

  5. land links: place–based learning, linking content to local land and place.

  6. non-linear: producing innovations and understanding by thinking laterally or combining systems.

  7. deconstruct/reconstruct: modelling and scaffolding, working from wholes to parts (watch then do).

  8. community links: centring local viewpoints, applying learning for community benefit.

These 8 ways can be considered more simply as:

  1. tell a story.

  2. make a plan.

  3. think and do.

  4. draw it.

  5. take it outside.

  6. try a new way.

  7. watch first, then do.

  8. share it with others.

Student resources K-6

Finite verbs are central to a clause and therefore to sentences. The finite verbs are the element that express what is happening in a sentence and locate it in time (tense).

Some activities

  • Grammar sort e.g. noun, adjective, verb

  • Grammar hunt eg noun hunt in familiar reads or books of interest.

  • Highlight grammar focus in recent writing

Writing focus: Is my sentence complete?

Explicit teaching

There are different types of sentences. Students at the Foundation stage need to write accurate simple sentences using nouns and pronouns. Students also learn to compose some basic compound sentences using common conjunctions such as ‘and’ or ‘but’.

As students learn to apply their beginning writing knowledge to compose texts, be aware that their ideas may become jumbled or meaning lost through the effort of writing. Teach students that texts are made up of words that make meaning and sentences should express a complete idea.

Common sentence structure errors that prevent writing from making sense at sentence level include:

Missing words – If words are left out then meaning can be lost and if a noun, pronoun or verb is missing the sentence won’t express a complete idea.

Example 1: He on a chair/He sat on a chair.

Example 2: Sat on a chair/The boy sat on a chair.

Incorrect word order – If the subject is in the wrong position meaning can be completely altered and if words are in the wrong order the idea often no longer makes sense.

Example 1: The chair sat on a boy/The boy sat on a chair.

Example 2: The boy sat a chair on/The boy sat on a chair.

General strategies

Engage students with frequent experiences of hearing accurate texts read aloud. Prompt students to consider what idea a sentence conveys and what happens if words are left out or word order is changed.

Teachers should encourage students to re-read what they have written to check at sentence level that the ideas are clear and important words or phrases are not out of order or missing. This will support more complex forms of sentence structure at later stages of learning.

Rehearsing and verbalising ideas before writing are useful strategies to assist students to organise their thoughts. In Kindergarten students (particularly EAL/D) may have limited or no print literacy. Do not rely on student self-correction or prompts such as: ‘Does that sound right?’

Explicitly teach sentence structure by demonstrating what is possible with nouns, pronouns, conjunctions and word order and what is not. Use definitive statements to teach sentence structure, e.g. The words in this sentence are in the wrong order; This sentence does not make sense; This sentence is missing an important word.

Activities to support the strategy

Activity 1: sentence doctors

Can be done in a whole class or small group context.

  • Prepare three or four sentences from a familiar shared text. Display enlarged sentences with some words removed (initially leave spaces to indicate missing words) or with jumbled word order.

  • Inform students which text the sentences are from but that there are some mistakes and today they need to be sentence doctors.

    • Try to include a sentence that could be fixed in more than one way.

    • Try to include a sentence that has lost the key idea, e.g. “Hush was (missing word - invisible)”

  • Read the sentences aloud together and ask students to contribute ideas for fixing the sentences.

  • Record any coherent suggestions and display.

  • Be prepared to explain any suggestions that do not make sense, students (particularly EAL/D) will need support to understand why words need to be grouped in certain ways to express certain ideas.

  • Re-read the shared text to find the original sentences and compare these with students’ suggestions.

Activity 2: making sentences

This exercise can be a whole lesson, a regular literacy activity, a lesson break or writing warm-up to support students’ familiarity with making sense through word order and organising ideas.

  • Use sentences from familiar or everyday texts cut up into words and reconstruct them to make meaning.

  • Use simple or compound sentences to differentiate the activity for your students’ learning readiness.

  • Include or remove sentence punctuation to differentiate the activity for your students’ learning needs.

Variation: students add words and conjunctions to join ideas to the assembled text and form a compound sentence.

Variation: students attempt to complete this activity in pairs or individually once they are familiar with it.

Extension: use a sequence of 2-3 sentences from familiar or everyday texts cut up into words and reconstruct them to make meaning