I am really enjoying aligning my literacy teaching with our Science: The Living World, Inquiry topic for this term.
I was surprised, early on in the term by how many, what I had assumed 'basic' words, were missing from a large number of my students' vocabularies. I was wondering how to teach concepts about habitats, adaptation and camouflage, while realising most of my class didn't know the word 'beak'.
I have really endeavoured to read aloud to my class on a daily basis. Now that my students are in a good routine, there is enough time to really dig deep into understanding a shared text, which I feel has been beneficial to developing vocabulary knowledge around our topic.
Having put a lot of effort with my lower groups into differentiating the vowel sounds and applying this to our sounding out, I am realising that a lot of my higher level readers still have gaps in this area. So, this is an area of ongoing work.
Going forward, I want to focus the children on awareness of audience when reading and writing. I would like to encourage more 'reading to' by the students themselves. This may take shape in little self-directed video clips... I'll keep you posted!
