Look at Me by Miriam Macdonald
Ready to Read, Magenta
Teachers will build on children’s prior experiences and understandings to support them to read Ready to Read books at Magenta, within an instructional setting, as soon as they start school.
Hickory Dickory Dock
Ready to Read poem card for shared reading
Children build their literacy knowledge through their experiences of spoken language in everyday life. When they start school, most children will:
- be able to communicate their experience in many ways and begin to interpret the ways in which others represent experience;
- be developing a memory for spoken or written text and be able to retell an experience, an event, or a known story in sequence;
- have a wide oral vocabulary of nouns and verbs and be able to use many adjectives and prepositions, particularly those relating to colour, shape, and size;
- be curious about aspects of language such as rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration and enjoy nonsense stories and rhymes;
- have an awareness of rhyme and of words that start with the same sound and be able to hear and distinguish some phonemes in spoken words;
- have the confidence and ability to communicate needs, ideas, and viewpoints with mostly correct syntax;
- be able to connect stories to their own experiences and lives and respond to texts in ways that demonstrate engagement with the text (e.g., to laugh at funny bits, empathise with a character, join in, or express an opinion) and an understanding of the storyline.
Young children often “read” and “write” by imitating experts. For example, they may “read” by leafing through a familiar book page by page and reciting the story. They may “write” by making purposeful marks that are not recognisable as letters or words. When children “read” their own “written” stories back, they demonstrate that they are able to hold an idea in their head long enough to retell the story. These rehearsals of reading and writing are important behaviours to observe and encourage.
Children will enjoy participating in classroom activities that involve reading and writing. Many children will:
- have developed some concepts about print (e.g., they hold a book the right way up or know that a book is read from front to back);
- “read” very familiar stories by reciting them;
- recognise the distinctive characteristics of book language;
- use illustrations in text to support them to understand or tell the story;
- enjoy returning to books and stories over and over again;
- be able to read their own names as well as some signs and symbols from their environment (e.g., logos, brand names, cultural symbols);
- be able to identify the first letter of their name;
- be able to discriminate between shapes that are the same and different, identify simple sequences, and point out the same letter in different places;
- write their own names using the correct letters in the correct order;
- form some other letters correctly;
- hold a pencil securely to draw and to “write”;
- enjoy “writing” for a variety of purposes, using some letters, and be able to recite their story or text back to another person.
Nanny, Ready to Read poem card for shared reading
