Australian Teachers: Reading

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Book Week 2016 is nearly here! Book Week is one of my favourite school events on the calendar, and this year I'm the Book Week Coordinator at my school. I thought I'd share some ideas and activities for Book Week.

Hi, it's Jem from Jem's Bright Buttons. I love books; that's my classroom bookshelf in the picture above - and that's not the whole bookshelf! Book Week is a great opportunity to celebrate reading! I think it's really important that all students are exposed to lots of opportunities to read, explore books and other texts, and respond to them.

The Book of the Year is announced on the third Friday in August, and Children's Book Week starts the following day. This year Book Week is Saturday 20th August to Friday 26th August. The theme this year is:

It's a great theme with lots of possibilities.

At my school we will be having a Book Parade on the Monday morning. All staff and students are invited to dress up as a character from a book (we accept pretty much everything though!). This year, because it's close to the Olympics, and because we are holding it in the first week of our Inquiry on the Earth & Space Science curriculum, we will be encouraging students to dress up as sportspeople or as something to do with space. We sit together outside (if the weather is ok), play fun music, and each grade parades around in a circle to show off their wonderful costumes. It's a very well supported event! And it's so much fun!!

As the Book Week coordinator at my school I share a list of possible activities for teachers to complete in their literacy times during Book Week. This means that teachers choose what will suit their students, and it can be less disruptive to an already very full curriculum. Below are some of my suggestions/ideas. Some of the ideas link to the theme, but I also think Book Week is just a fantastic opportunity to celebrate literature and reading in any way possible.

Mystery readers – invite some parent volunteers to come into your classroom at an appropriate time to read their favourite book, or a book you’ve suggested, to the class
Book Swap – run an ‘in-class’ Book Swap. Students bring in some books they no longer want (with parents permission), and swap their books for others that have been brought in
Read Dreamtime stories and connect the stories to the Australian land (linking with the theme)
Students could make their own mini story books and read them to students in a different class (emphasising that everyone is an author)
Read a different shortlisted book to your class every day (or one of your favourite books every day). Shortlisted books can be found here
Link literature and your Inquiry/theme/topic by reading and exploring books about the Inquiry/theme/topic
Read back through previous award winners or shortlisted books (can be found here); read well-known stories by Australian authors
Ask students to draw the front cover of their favourite book and make a display
Make an anchor chart of different ways we read and different things we read (read the text, read the pictures, retell the story; read books, magazines, newspapers, catalogues, websites, games, etc.)
Ask students to bring in a book that their parent/aunt/uncle/grandparent loves, and share them with the class
Play ‘Celebrity Heads’ with well-known book characters
Get students to write ‘Who am I?’ clues for their favourite book characters
Have groups of students practice and perform well-known stories, or readers theatre activities
Have an extra ‘independent reading’ time every day during Book Week for students to enjoy books; allow them to pick different books, or different text types; spend some time reading and sharing books from the school library
Have an in-class reading challenge – who can read the most books in the week? Who can read the widest variety of texts? Who can read to the most number of people?
Hold a class discussion about stories: what are they? Where do they come from? How do you know if they’re true stories? Are there different types of stories? What do stories tell us? How do we tell stories?
Write a rhyming poem after reading Piranhas Don't Eat Bananas (find a YouTube video of the story here)
Make a comic strip to retell a favourite story, a Dreamtime story, an Australian story, a fairy tale, etc.
Use toys or paper puppets to construct a scene from a favourite story, photograph the scene, print the photo, and have students write about what happened before the scene and what will happen next
Ask students to write a story about Australia
Look at wordless books (like Window or Where the Forest Meets the Sea by Jeannie Baker) and have students tell the story in their own words
Write a journey story about visiting somewhere in Australia
Complete the My Dead Bunny word search (find it here)
Film/photograph any of these activities and share them on Seesaw or ClassDojo, or another parent communication tool, like your school newsletter

You might like to do some directed drawings of Aussie animals like Sheri from Early Years with Sheri did with her class:

For some other great ideas check out these three posts from The Book Chook: Focus on Storytelling, Educational Activities, and Resources.

I hope these ideas might spark some fun, enjoyment and love of literature and reading during Book Week 2016!! I'm definitely looking forward to coming up with my costume, and making our reading lessons for the week all about the love of literature.

Thanks for reading!

Jem

Hi Guys!

It's Chantelle, from Miss Jacobs Little Learners and today I'm going to be sharing some of the books and teaching tools I like to use during my Read Aloud's to reinforce comprehension strategies.

I teach at least 2 reading comprehension strategy lessons per week so I am always on the lookout for some new and exciting texts. When I introduce each comprehension strategy I use these posters which help explain what the strategy is in child-friendly language. I then leave them up on our Literacy Wall and they are referred to regularly.

These posters come in a variety of designs and are available HERE in my TPT store.

Books for Read Aloud's

Below you will find some of the books I have used and recommend for each comprehension strategy.

Visualising

Making Connections - Text To Self

Inferring

Miss Jacobs Little Learners

Hello everyone! This is Casey from Little Lifelong Learners. This week I am going to share some of my favourite ways to learn sight words in the early years classroom!

As we all know, learning to read is one of the biggest skills we develop during our time at school. It's a skill that we all use every single day so it's important we give our students a wonderful and positive foundation for early reading during their first years at school.

Learning sight words is one of the first steps in learning how to read and there are so many fun ways we can encourage our students to learn these words. Today I'm going to share some of my very favourite activities that I've come across!

Crayon resist sight words - Write the words with a white crayon and paint over them with water colours.

Type your words - grab some old keyboards and have students type their words.

Shaving Cream - I love this idea by Jem's Bright Buttons. She squirts shaving cream onto plates where her students can write their words over and over. It's so easy to clean up afterwards because you just wash the plate!

Scrabble Tiles - You can get these relatively cheaply from ebay and the kids just love arranging the letters into their words.

Whiteboard Words - Grab a set of whiteboards (you can get them very cheap at places like Daiso or the $2 shops) and have your students write their words with markers. Such a simple and effective idea from Paula's Place.

Tic Tac Toe - I came across this fantastic idea by Jacinta (@cintaandco) on Instagram and I thought it looked like so much fun! Write your sight words onto different coloured paper and use them as counters for the game.

Sight Word Fishing - Write the sight words onto fish and add staples or paperclips to the end. Use a magnetic rod so that students can 'catch' their words.

Salt Writing - Paula's Place shared this wonderful idea for sight word work - tracing words into a tray of salt. This would be a wonderful sensory experience for students as well!

Text it - Grab this free download from TPT, print and then laminate. This one was always super popular with my Prep students!

Bottle Cap Stacking - This fantastic idea from A Little Pinch of Perfect is a great way to review sight words! I love that she is recycling materials too - something I'm sure we all do as early years teachers!

Bead Words - Fine Motor and Sight Word development at it's finest! This is such a great idea from @kindergarten_adventures_ - she writes the words onto her blackboard table and has the students place beads over her writing. They are working on their words and important fine motor skills at the same time. Love it

For more fun sight word activities, check out some of my sight word posts on the Little Lifelong Learners blog!

Casey

Hello Everyone! It's Stephanie from Fishing for Education here and in case you didn't know, I'm originally from Florida, U.S.A. I moved to Australia in June 2014 and started teaching in Australia that November.

I was doing relief for a few months and was exposed to a variety of "new to me" books. When I was hired full-time I was exposed to more and found joy in creating lesson plans around some awesome books.

Here are a few books I've really enjoyed along the way! Hopefully this will help new to the country or new to teaching be exposed to some amazing books.

My Favourite Books

This was the first true Australian book I was exposed to. I was in a Year 3/4 split class and our History curriculum had us explore early settlers and the impact they had on Australia. It also focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history. This is such an AMAZING story. This was great for my Year 3s as it exposed the story and helped explain both sides of the story. My Year 4s were able to extend their thinking and analyse the story and imagery. The IMAGERY! So much detail. We spent a few days analysing each spread and discussed what they were implying.

I'm in a Year 4 class this year and my team teacher and I wanted to expose the students to chapter books. This book has a good 6 chapters, so it wasn't too long for the students. There are TONS of great vocabulary words related to the time period and boating. My students were amazed to learn this to be a true story and living in WA they enjoyed the fact they knew what Fremantle was and instantly shouted out "I've been there!" It has a great theme of courage and determination, not to mention anyone can make a difference.

We were talking about characters and understanding characters based on actions, thoughts and what they say. My students were good and understanding fictitious characters. This book was a great transition into biographies, which we've noticed non-fiction was challenging for our Year 4s. This book doesn't come off as your typical biography. The images really seem to come alive as you read and my students thoroughly enjoyed the story. We then took some time to research more about Banjo Paterson and they were amazed to see him on a $10 note. (I'm finding myself learning more Australian history than some of my Aussie friends!) She also has a whole series of famous Australians. I definitely plan to get some more books in this series.

Here in WA we're now on your School Holidays and ANZAC Day right after our last day of term. Since the students wouldn't be in school for this day we decided to have our ANZAC service this past Thursday. We've read a variety of books, but most of my students felt the books to be too sad or overwhelming for them to follow along. When I read this story I grabbed everyone's attention, even my special needs students who don't like stories about ANZAC as they found it too violent. The students told me they really enjoyed hearing about the stories just like how the boy in the story did. We used the books we had read to write about "What is ANZAC Day and why is it important?" Majority of the writing in my class had information from this book specifically.

I'm still getting exposed to more and more, especially the books on The Children's Book Council of Australia.