Bringing Meaning to Reading.

Reading for meaning is an important skill as without meaning children are just decoding words. The role of the teacher is to develop in the children a variety of strategies, which allow them to make links between the text and themselves, the world and other texts. These connections allow them to bring meaning to and extract meaning from texts. According to the new NSW syllabus the key comprehension strategies include:  

• activating and using prior knowledge
• identifying literal information explicitly stated in the text
• making inferences based on information in the text and their own prior knowledge
• predicting likely future events in a text
• visualising by creating mental images of elements in a text
• summarising and organising information from a text
• integrating ideas and information in texts
• critically reflecting on content, structure, language and images used to construct meaning in a text. (glossary - comprehension)

Throughout the week, the children in Year 3 participate in a variety of activities to enhance their comprehension skills. Gabriella, Eden and Declan reflected on one area of our reading program:

Learning Centres

Everyday Year Three work in teams for Learning Centres. There are four groups; pink, green, purple and blue. Each week we rotate throughout the activities, which include Reader's Theatre, Comprehension Activities, Guided Reading or Reciprocal Reading  Sessions with the teacher, Whisper Phones and Published Writing. Gabriella, Eden and Declan

Guided Reading sessions allow us to develop our reading strategies

Readers' Theatre helps us develop our expression.

We love using the 'Whisper Phones' as it is a great way to hear ourselves reading so we can improve our fluency.

Our favourite part of Readers' Theatre is using expression to show different characters and emotions.