2.Learning+To+Read

= = =Learning to Read... =

   Many children begin to learn to read even before they attend school. When a child enters Prep they will have often been exposed to several types of picture books and texts. Obviously, only a sm all percentage of students, if any can identify words when beginning Prep. However, by the end of their first year of schooling the majority of students should be able to identify some high frequency words and have grasped the basic concepts of reading for example; that we read from left to right along the page. It should never be assumed in teaching that students 'just know' these simple things that we take for granted. Students in the early years must be taught for example; what is an exclamation mark? What is a comma? When are capital letters used? Which way do we write along the page? and so on...   According to Susan Hill’s textbook ‘Developing Early Literacy’ there are four main levels at which books become harder through all of the age groups and year levels…  **Emergent texts** are filled with high frequency words and hardly have more than 50 words throughout the whole text. These books have a plain and simple story line and often have repeated sentence structures throughout the text. Also, quite often, children can work out what the words say by simply looking at the pictures on the opposite page. In **early texts** the concepts are rather similar. The only changes are that the word count will increase, there are longer sentences and the placement of the text on the pages varies. **Transitional texts** begin to deal with topics that are unfamiliar to children and there is a range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Obviously the sentence length again increases and the difficulty of vocabulary increases also. There becomes more complex story lines and increasingly difficult words in **<span style="background-color: rgb(251, 210, 60)">extending texts .** Narratives invite more characters and there is a larger variety of text types. There are generally less pictures and use of more complex text features.

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