Starting Daily 3 Literacy

Part of our structured literacy program involves Daily 3. It is actually called Daily 5 (https://www.thedailycafe.com/daily-5), but  in Prep we only do 3 parts at a time. These are components to literacy that we spend time on every day throughout Primary School (weekly for each Prep class). They include:

Read to Someone

Read to Self

Listen to Reading

Word Work

Work on Writing

Literacy is very much embedded into all aspects of the Prep curriculum, including spontaneous ‘teachable’ moments that arise during play. Daily 3 is the systematic instructional component of the Communicating Curriculum that focuses on building children’s phonemic awareness and prepares them for writing.

Let’s take a look at this week . . .

Read to Self

This term we are focusing on Read to Self and for the first few weeks we have been explicitly teaching the expectations of how to go about reading a book to yourself and then practising, building stamina with each practise. Ask your child if they can tell you about these posters . . .

 

You may be wondering how Prep can read books to themselves. There are three ways to read a book. One is to read the words. Here are two more:

 

The children like to find special places to sit by themselves . . .

 

Word Work

At Word Work we learn to write letters and words.The first few weeks of Prep we have been practising some very special words: our names.
 

This week we learnt about a letter . . .

m is for marbles . . .

Work on Writing

Work on writing is all about exposing children to the concepts of writing as well as providing opportunities to prepare their hands for writing efficiently.

 

 

This week we were practising hopping patterns, our names and the letter m in shaving foam. This activity was designed to be fun, but also to support children's sensory development and mid-line crossing. Some children find it difficult to cross their writing hand all the way over to the left and write/draw from left to right (or cross their left hand all the way to the right if they are left handed). These children can often be seen switching the pen or paint brush to the hand closest to where they are working. 

The ability to cross the midline is important on the physical level as well as on the brain level. Crossing the midline of your body helps build pathways in the brain and is an important prerequisite skill required for the appropriate development of various motor and cognitive skills. On the brain level, a lack of midline crossing may indicate that the left and right sides of the brain (the left and right hemispheres) are not communicating well together. It is also foundational to many everyday tasks, including reading and writing. 

 

 We have been learning about syllables (the separate parts of words) during a part of our literacy program called PreLit (for the teachers out there familiar with Daily 5, we use this as our CAFÉ component –https://www.thedailycafe.com/cafe/cafe-menus). Carers can find out more about the PreLit program here:

http://www.multilit.com/programs/prelit-program/

Carers are able to register and learn how to use PreLit with their children at home.

The children know that the purpose of Daily 5 and PreLit (we call it our ABC lesson) is to help them become clever readers and writers. For a more comprehensive explanation of Daily 3 (known as Daily 5 in Primary School) wander over to my old blog page through these links:

https://mtannanprep.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/first-steps-into-daily-5/

Carers who would like to know how to help prepare your child for success in literacy, I encourage you to read this post:

https://mtannanprep.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/interactive-reading/