I thought I would share the literacy activities Kathleen Morris and I have planned for our classes (2KJ and 2KM) next week. The start of a new school year is crucial for developing routines and structures to ensure all students work to their full potential and understand our expectations.    READING Our whole class reading [...]

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School begun for Victorian government schools this week. Teachers spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday doing professional development in schools before meeting their new grades on Friday.   Last year I took on the role of the Prep-Grade 2 Literacy Co-ordinator at my school. I will be doing this again in 2011, and my responsibilities will extend to [...]

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Welcome back! A new school year begins in Australian schools in a few weeks. I enjoyed reading Kathleen Morris’s goals for 2011, and I have also started thinking about new goals, objectives and ideas for 2011. I look forward to sharing more of my experiences in Literacy with you this year.   I am always looking for new [...]

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With only one week to go in the school year, I thought it was a good time to reflect on my Literacy teaching practice. I am passionate about all subject areas in the primary school curriculum, but Literacy is my favourite part of the day (hence this blog!). It is difficult to narrow down all [...]

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This blog, Teaching Literacy in the Early Years has been nominated in the 2010 Edublog Awards The blog has been nominated in the following categories: Best New Blog and Best Teacher Blog Click on the links above to vote!  ************* Voting is now open and ends on Tuesday December 14th. Please lodge your votes! Only [...]

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My grade two students are blogging buddies with Jonah Salsich’s third grade class in Connecticut, USA. One of the great things about connecting with schools from around the world is the sharing of ideas. I loved this writing idea that Jonah came up with and blogged about on his class blog, read it here. I decided to give it [...]

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The 2010 Edublog Awards are open for nomination. These awards, now in their seventh year, celebrate… …the achievements of edubloggers, twitterers, podcasters, video makers, online communities, wiki hosts and other web based users of educational technology. Here are the awards I would like to nominate for 2010: Best individual blog: Integrating Technology in the Primary [...]

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Last week I focussed on persuasive writing (or expositions) with my Grade Two class. As it is the genre for the writing task in NAPLAN (which is national standardised testing we have in Australia)  next year, it is important that my students are familiar with the structure and expectations of this tricky genre. Jenny Eather’s terrific website Writing [...]

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At the moment I am focussing on making inferences with my Grade Two students.   Making inferences is a vital comprehension skill in which the reader draws conclusions using key words and clues within the text to infer what is happening. I believe it is essential to explicitly teach young students how to figure out what the author [...]

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I have been wanting to blog about teaching comprehension to young students for a while now, but it is such a big topic I didn’t know where to begin! I have decided to break up the huge area of comprehension into several different posts.  Today I am explaining how I use question and answer worksheets [...]

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