Non-Fiction Level 3-4 - Early Days in Sydney Town
Sample text: Early Days in Sydney Town (PDF - 35Kb)
The purpose of Early Days in Sydney Town is for students to increase or broaden their knowledge of the topic through engaging in literacy activities. To achieve this, students will be encouraged to get their knowledge of the topic ready; to build an improved comprehension or understanding while reading; and to consolidate and review their new understanding of the topic.
Student activities that facilitate learning from the text include:
- Describing their reading plans for texts that are intended to teach new ideas.
- Identifying particular types of informative texts; deciding the purposes of each type; and linking the purpose with actions they might take or questions they might ask after reading.
- Working out the meanings of unfamiliar words in less redundant contexts by synthesising text information across sentences in factual text. Students gradually refine their understanding of the term as they continue to read and link key text words with synonyms.
- Deciding possible questions that may be answered by each type of text they have learnt as well as identifying the questions the text answers.
- Identifying paragraph information that facilitates reading; for example, learning to use topic sentences as a way of getting an idea of what a paragraph is about.
- Summarising two or more paragraphs in an integrated way, noting the key ideas.
- Consolidating what they read in a range of ways.
The teaching activities recommend both group reading activities, with one or more students reading aloud, and individual silent reading activities. During each teaching session the text is read as an interactive group learning activity.
Once the students have read the text provided, they are encouraged to pursue further texts using either online or hard copy information sources. This should provide further opportunity for students to practise factual reading strategies. In addition, individual students can share the information sources they have located and used with class peers and identify how each source assisted them to answer relevant questions.