Understand how to use strategies for spelling words, including spelling rules, knowledge of morphemic word families, spelling generalizations, and letter combinations including double letters Incorporate new vocabulary from a range of sources into students’ own texts including vocabulary encountered in research Building the field: Ask children what sound does the letter c make? (kuh) Prompt for (sss) if not heard. Explain the terms hard and soft c. Brainstorm other words as a class. Make a table on the whiteboard with two columns titled Hard C and Soft C and sort each brainstormed word into columns Give children 5 minutes in small groups to see if they can work out a rule for identifying whether there should be a hard or soft c when spelling a word Come back together as a group and talk about theories. Make a rule as a group which can be displayed in the room for future reference (see example appendix 3a) Independent: Give children a copy of the text of The Heart and the Bottle. Ask children to go through and find words that start with and contain the letter c, and put them in the right column (appendix 3b). Early finishers can look through other texts and identify c words and add them to their table Reflection: Bring children together and talk about which column had the most words, is there a trend? Are there any words that contain both a soft and hard c? E.g. cycle, circle, circus, circuit. Write some challenging c words on the whiteboard and get children to work out the pronunciation using the rule Contribution to class discussion Identifies all hard c and soft c words from the text and places them appropriately in the table Uses the spelling rule to identify where to use a hard or soft c Individual copies of the text from The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers Display paper and markers (A3) Appendix 3a and 3b for reference Appendix 3a
AusVELS level 4 Descriptors Explicit teaching Assessment Resources Understand how texts vary in complexity and technicality depending on the approach to the topic, the purpose and the intended audience Identify features of online texts that enhance readability including text, navigation, links, graphics and layout Identify characteristic features used in imaginative, informative and persuasive texts to meet the purpose of the text Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning to expand content knowledge, integrating and linking ideas and analysing and evaluating texts Before reading: Read the title of the text “The Science of the Stars” and discuss what sort of text it might be (informative). Who would the audience be? (people interested in stars, students) What sort of word/writing would we expect to see in an informative/factual text? (facts, scientific words, formal language). Explain that we will be reading the text and then charting the facts that we have learned from the text. During reading: Read text aloud and ask for some facts that the children heard mentioned. Joint deconstruction: Discuss how we could classify the information we have heard. (colour, size, names etc) Joint construction: using information from the text and classifying into a table (see appendix 4a for list of facts) Individual construction: Give each child a copy of the text and get them to write down as many facts as they can from the text. Get the children to make a of all the facts that they have found using own headings to group facts. After reading: Reflection: Discuss some of the headings children used for their information. Now show the image from the text. Discuss how this had added meaning to the text or what the children have gleaned from the image. Can we be sure that the information we have gleaned is factual? Talk about inferences. What other information can we infer from the text - what would it sound like, look like, feel like in space amongst the stars using the knowledge we have gleaned from the facts? Contribution to discussion on informative/ factual texts. Extraction of facts from the text classified correctly according to labeling Contribution to discussion regarding inferring information from texts Individual copies of the factual text – The Science of the Stars by Derek Agnew, from ABC Spark website Whiteboard Appendix 4a for reference Appendix 4a