English

Term 1 Week 9

English Activities

English resources

Sight Word Books

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.

  • Read a book or visit www.storylineonline.net/

  • Learn a new nursery Rhyme (print it, read along with words, write rhyming words)


Spelling focus

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

Soundwave unit to be covered:

Click here to see which sound we are learning today.

Apps and interactive programs

Grammar focus:

Write a sentence using sight words

Writing focus: Text organisation

Keep a diary of what you do each day. This could be a picture with a simple sentence to explain.

Write out your sight words in rainbow colours

Cut out letters from magazines to make your name/sight words

Students at the Foundation stage use their beginning writing knowledge to express one or two ideas in written texts. In order to support the beginning organisation of ideas students need a clear understanding that sentences are the key unit to express ideas in their writing.

Strategy

Explicit teaching

Students need to understand that words within sentences are organised to express ideas. Sentences contain words or groups of words and meaning (making sense) is controlled to a great extent by word order (be mindful that students’ diverse language backgrounds may not rely on word order to make meaning). At this stage students compose mostly simple sentences and some compound sentences using simple conjunctions to connect ideas.

Sentences can:

  • make statements: There is a brown dog.

  • ask questions: What colour is the dog?

  • give commands: Look at the dog.

  • join ideas: There is a brown dog and he is playing.

General strategies

Although some students may have an innate sense of organising words to express ideas in writing, in Kindergarten students may not have the necessary breadth of experience. Students may have limited or no print literacy. Do not rely on student self-correction or prompt questions such as: ‘Does that sound right?’

Explicitly teach sentence structure by demonstrating what is possible with word order and what is not. Students will rely on teacher cues so use definitive statements to teach word order, for example, The words in this sentence are in the wrong order; This sentence makes sense; This does not make sense.

Engage students with frequent experiences of hearing accurate texts read aloud. Comment on the organisation of words and ideas. Prompt students to consider what words mean in a particular order and what happens if that order is changed.

Teach sentence structure for simple and compound sentences. Provide sentence scaffolds to guide students to organise and express their ideas in simple and compound sentences.

Activities to support the strategy

Activity 1: 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 reassemble them to make meaning.

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

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

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 re-assemble them to make meaning.

Activity 2: silly sentences

This humorous word order exercise can be done as a modelled or guided whole class activity, in small groups or as a literacy centre activity. It demonstrates that word order in sentences is important to meaning:

Note: model this activity before asking students to complete it – continue to model/guide whole class as necessary.

  • Use sentences from familiar or everyday texts, or prepare your own.

  • Select a sentence, read it aloud, write it down and draw a picture to match the sentence.

  • Change the word order to create the opposite meaning, write the new sentence and draw a picture to match.

Optional: provide students with a graphic organiser or folded page for recording their sentences and drawing.

Example

Changed meaning – The dog chased a stick/the stick chased a dog.

  • Conclude with students sharing their pictures and sentences and discussing how the meaning changed.

Extension: Provide students with sentences that can be changed in more than one way and still make sense.

Online resources