Ideas Communicated: Scaffolding Learning From 0.5
Indicators of Progress
- Students talk about their personal experiences and comprehend and respond to those of peers in appropriate ways.
- Students recall the names of familiar objects and events in their environments and comprehend individual words, for example, they can point to or otherwise indicate objects, actions and perceptual attributes, such as big versus little when these are named.
- Students comprehend and respond to oral scripts both with and without parallel visual information (for example, they listen to short stories, do a Big Book activity, or watch a video). They look for relevant sentence forms (various grammatical forms, one-event sentences), and ‘tell’ the events in a story in the correct order by using pictures or other supports.
- Students comprehend simple classroom instructions both for managing behaviour and for learning. They can interpret them as an action sequence.
- Students ask and answer simple questions about ideas heard or seen, for example, answer who, where and when questions for a picture book in which they have participated.
- Students contribute ideas to discussions about familiar events.
- Students experiment with communicating in different ways; they speak, sing favourite songs and rhymes and may use these in play.
Teaching Strategies
Before speaking and listening: Getting your knowledge ready
The learning and teaching approach for speaking and listening is illustrated for students responding to the story The Little Red Hen.
Ask and answer questions about ideas heard or seen
Introduce The Little Red Hen Big and ask students to look at the front cover and describe what it shows, for example - Who can you see?
Point to each animal in turn and ask the students to name the animal.
Read the title and ask students to repeat it. Ask questions:
- Who is sweeping?
- Who is asleep?
Tell them to look at what each animal is wearing and ask: What is the colour of the Little Red Hen’s apron / the cat’s dress / the dog’s pants?
Remove the cover from view and ask the students to make a ‘mental picture’ of the cover and what it shows. Ask them to talk about what they see. After they have responded, show them the cover again.
Show the students the back cover. Ask them to say:
- What does it show?
- How it is like the picture on the front cover?
Then ask the students to predict:
- In this story who do you think will be working?
- Who do you think will be resting?
During speaking and listening: Tuning in to ideas
The learning and teaching approach for speaking and listening is illustrated for students responding to the story The Little Red Hen.
Comprehend and respond to oral scripts
Students are briefly shown the cover of The Little Red Hen. Hide it from their view and ask them to tell you who is in the story and what each animal is like.
Show a page and ask students to say what they see in the picture.
Read the page and ask about the content:
- What does this page tell us?
- Who is talking?
Identify key vocabulary and ask questions about the vocabulary – What does gossip/chat mean?
Answer simple questions about ideas heard or seen
Ask the students to say again what is shown on the page. Show the pictures on subsequent pages and ask Who can you see in these pictures?
Ask the students to describe what the pictures show – What are the main body parts of the cat?
Comprehend word meaning
Review the vocabulary so far and ask the students - What is another way of saying:
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Students play the game ‘Simon Says’ with the new vocabulary and act out the key words and phrases – combed her hair.
Answer simple questions
Students answer literal questions about the text so far to review what they have heard:
- Who was tired?
- Who gossiped all the time?
- What colour was the Red Hen’s house?
Practise asking simple questions
When viewing a page, students are asked to pose questions about the picture for others to answer:
- a who question - Who is sleeping? Who is pointing?
- a where question - Where is the dog sleeping?
- a why question - Why is the dog sleeping?