English Teacher Jonathan Perry
Within Grade 1 it is essential to always have a firm grasp of the basics, to then allow the children to flourish and push themselves to reach Grade 2. Each student starts their journey from the first day of their school life and every week they learn new words, phonics patterns, grammar structures and readings to excite and extend their learning at an amazing rate!
Our focus in Grade 1 starts with the individual. Our readings take us through the life of Sam and we constantly link to the child’s own life, from pets, siblings, parents and family. We then start to move outwards to their neighbourhood, their school and the people they find around them.
As the students start their journey within the school Reading Street keeps the genre at a basic level, using “Realistic Fiction” to guide the curriculum alongside Sam and his life. This consistency is helpful to really understand the way realistic fiction works and give a firm understanding of reality within stories meaning a constant connection to the child’s own life and links to their own reality. This is safe and means they can express themselves within understood boundaries.
Farmer’s Market brings a perfect example of a safe adventure into the wider world and where we base our first project. Within the story Pam, a young girl, goes to the Farmer’s Market with her father. They travel on the bus, they go shopping together, they look around all of the stalls, it rains, but they have fun! Every child can relate to this story, so it’s an amazing conversation starter!
We start the discussion from the reading itself. But, within Grade 1 we have very basic text and the descriptions and information held inside the sentences is often not enough. There is another amazing resource available to the students though, the pictures upon every page. Because of this we focus on a skill of ‘Reading Pictures’ to find more information, adding our own additional descriptions to really enjoy the reading in full.
To further push the students to understand the reading, both in text and in pictures, we looked more closely at the genre. As “Realistic” is something that is real and “Fiction” means not real, the children worked together to find everything within the story that fit under these two headings. Travelling on a bus to a market, something very realistic, but not wearing a mask on public transport, unthinkable, so clearly fiction! The children really enjoyed discussing the reality of the story and their interpretation of each page, fully understanding the genre of the reading in an unforgettable discussion.
The first time we move away from realistic fiction is when we meet Lin’s Fish and Ox Helps. Both take us to a different genre of “Animal Fantasy”, something still very relatable to a student in Grade 1. The skill of ‘Reading Pictures’ again played a major role in understanding the reading and genre, so we focussed on this in a different way and asked the children to predict the text that could go alongside the pictures of the reading.
Ox Helps tells us a story of a boy and a girl that have a big blue ox that is pretty amazing! He can drive, he has super strength and he is one coooool dude. The children were asked to imagine sentences to describe the actions they saw in the picture, from Ox driving a tractor to help out on the farm, to him racing up a mountain and taking the children shopping. Each picture brought a great amount of excited discussion from the children in predicting the possibilities of the text.
This was also a perfect opportunity for the children to show off their usage of extended sentences, adding in verbs and adjectives to really explain their idea for the page, working together to really create a story that worked with the picture. Then, after presenting their page to the class, reading the text that goes along with the picture and understanding how well they did in their own descriptions and predictions. A really fun activity using reading, listening, writing and speaking together with their peers and experiencing being a mini-author right before becoming a full author and creating their own Animal Fantasy story!