Author Archive

Oral language teaching opportunities are abundant in the classroom.

Education should develop children’s capacities to become effective communicators, to understand the ideas of others and to communicate ideas in a meaningful way. Developing proficiency across speaking, listening, reading and writing is central to every child’s educational journey and begins with a child’s earliest school experiences.

All children arrive at Prep with different experiences and understandings about language …

What a treat it has been to visit Coomera Springs State School over the last fortnight. I had the pleasure of working for two days across the five prep classrooms to introduce reading stamina lessons to each class and then take teacher requests for writing, guided reading and whole class reading lessons. It was an exciting and dynamic two days, working with committed, passionate …

‘The Daily Chat’ – A book of weekly homework tasks for Prep & Kindy.

The Daily Chat is the latest publication by Literacy Solutions to support busy teachers. The Daily Chat is a 48 page publication containing nightly conversation prompts to promote and encourage oral language at home.

Frequent conversations support children to become effective communicators. The prompts in this book are designed to engage children …

Shared Reading is a valuable approach for teaching reading skills, strategies and knowledge. Most classrooms feature shared reading lessons, but does this guarantee explicit teaching occurs. Many teaching resources support teachers to facilitate reading instruction, but effective practitioners shift between reading approaches most of the day, delivering explicit reading instruction across subject areas and incorporating a broad range of text types. Literacy instruction, where ever …

Take advantage of more difficult texts in English and across the curriculum. We know that frequent, short bursts of explicit instruction produce powerful outcomes. We also know that students’ literacy skills and knowledge underpin the synthesis of new content across other key learning areas. Add to this, that the bulk of the texts students will be required to read, respond to and craft in secondary …

Many Teachers use components of Shared and Guided Reading as an approach to intervention. This strategy is a form of structured reading and can produce positive outcomes for students struggling with standard classroom teaching methods.

Structured Reading is a teaching approach for educators working with individuals or small groups of students. The approach blends shared reading and guided reading and also features some aspects of …

Aiden and his older brother, Jack, sit together to eat. Aiden lifts his banana, it slides from his fingers and drops to the concrete. Jack quickly comments, “Better eat that now; don’t save it for later.”

“Why?” asks Aiden.
“The bruise will make it go brown and squishy. Then it won’t be as good to eat.”
“How do you know?” enquires Aiden.
“I’ve dropped apples before. Trust me.”

Why does …

The classroom literacy program, sometimes referred to as the Literacy Block enables teachers to timetable for explicit teaching across reading, writing, speaking and listening, accompanied by differentiated learning, the independent application of skills and knowledge and a time to reflect or share.

In reading, approaches commonly used for explicit instruction include modelled reading and shared reading. These lessons may run for 15-20 minutes, with mini-lessons …

A literacy block should provide a balanced program of literacy instruction including the following teaching/learning approaches to support reading and writing.

Essential Reading Components:
Modelled Reading

occurs when an expert reader reads a difficult text to less experienced readers, enabling the experienced reader to model how effective readers sound, solve and think about texts when reading
The “think aloud” strategy is used strategically by the expert reader to model …

A limiting factor in the development of reading skills in students and an impediment to classroom management for teachers is the ability of children to read independently for significant periods of time. A valuable strategy to deal with both issues is increasing reading stamina.

Building reading stamina supports students to read for an extended time, trains muscle memory and supports an increased attention.

Teaching a procedure for …