Literacy tips
With Literacy demands being such critical skills for navigating our modern world (as well as many of the assessments students complete), teachers and students at Mount Waverley Secondary College have a big focus on developing Literacy skills in our classes.
We will be sharing some tips for how you can support Literacy at home in the Newsletter – for this issue, here are some ideas for developing reading skills.
- Fostering a culture of reading by sharing the novels and articles that you are reading, discussing what your child is reading, making trips to the library together, or setting some routines and habits for reading at home.
- Asking your child to talk about the English novel they are studying or other texts/articles they’ve looked at in class recently – even if you aren’t familiar with the text yourself, engaging students in conversations about these texts will help develop their overall understanding or help them identify gaps in their knowledge. Ask them to tell you about some key ideas, moments, or themes in these texts.
- Improving summary skills – asking your children to identify the key ideas in a passage/chapter they are reading for homework, or articles they’ve read; strong readers are continuously summarising and synthesising what they read.
- Having conversations about the bias or validity of media that we are consuming – helping students to develop critical thinking and evaluate the media that they encounter.
- For younger students, developing their reading fluency by getting them to read aloud to you – this helps with students becoming more confident readers, as well as thinking about sentence structures and pronunciation.
Through strategies like these, students continue to develop these critical Literacy skills that transfer outside of the classroom!
Learning Specialists