First Friday Author Day - Maurice Sendak

To celebrate the work of Maurice Sendak, the Grade 3/4s spent a day being inspired by his work 'where the wild things are', to create our own craft wild things and animated digital texts using our Scratch programming knowledge. Check out our very own wild things below and see if you can find them hiding in our Peace garden. We've also shared some of our Scratch Wild Things projects. Students had to create a sprite (Scratch image) of their craft and then program it to follow a set of instructions. The wild things talked, moved, sang and roaaaaaarrrred with students using their own voice recordings and adding special effects. Enjoy!

Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge

The Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge is now open and St Joseph’s is excited to be participating. The Vic PRC is a great opportunity for children to read as many books as they can throughout Term Two and Term Three.

The book list can be found at the challenge website https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/events/prc/Pages/ booklist.aspx.

The Challenge is open to all Victorian children from birth to Year 10 in recognition of the importance of reading for literacy development. It is not a competition; but a personal challenge for children to read a set number of books by 6 September 2019.

Children from Prep to Year 2 are encouraged to read or ‘experience’ 30 books with their parents and teachers. Children from Year 3 to Year 10 are challenged to read 15 books.

Your child has been given a username and password for the challenge. In order the keep track of the books that have been read, students and parents are to log the books using their username and password.

All children who meet the Challenge will receive a certificate of achievement signed by the Victorian Premier and former Premiers.

To read the Premier’s letter to parents, view the booklists and for more information about the Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge, visit: www.education.vic.gov.au/prc

Let’s get reading!

Reading in the Classroom

This term in reading, we will be continuing our focus on reading comprehension strategies in small group and individual sessions through targeted teaching. To support this, we will be introducing the Cars & Stars online program which focuses on the 12 main reading comprehension strategies. The program ensures instruction personalised to individual student needs, enabling every student to work on their specific reading comprehension goals.

Reading Comprehension Strategies

1. Finding the Main Idea;

2. Recalling Facts and Details

3. Understanding Sequence

4. Recognising Cause and Effect

5. Comparing and Contrasting

6. Making Predictions

7. Finding Word Meaning in Context

8. Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences

9. Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion

10. Identifying Author's Purpose

11. Interpreting Figurative Language

12. Summarising