1. Topics from Blackboard
1.1. T.1 - Effective teaching
1.2. T.3 - Literacy Development theories
1.3. T.4 - Pedagogy and Programs
1.3.1. Gradual release of resposibility
1.3.2. Key Links Shared Reading
1.3.3. Guided Reading
1.4. T.6 - Emerging reader & writier
1.4.1. reading readiness perspective and an emergent literacy perspective
1.5. T.9 - Extending Reading and Writing
1.5.1. Grammar and Punctuation
1.6. T.8 - Assessment
1.7. T.11 - ICT
1.8. T.12 - Learning Difficulty
2. Story Overview
2.1. 'Come Down, Cat!' is a heartening story of risking and overcoming fears for what we love. It is a wonderful book to support speech and language development of young children. The enormous descriptive language applied in the texts encourages children to engage with the story while creating vivid mental images of the events in the story. 'Come Down, Cat!' is a fantastic choice for focusing on sequencing and narrative retell skills for the reason of having an actual narrative structure. The book represents a range of captivating action, and mental verbs which children can practise including in their retells of the story, such as think, thought and remember.
3. Classroom focus
3.1. Language
3.1.1. Learning what is compound sentences. Examples of conjunctions: and, but, so, if, then, or, yet, because, since, while, where...
3.1.1.1. Topic 3: Bottom-up theory
3.1.2. Different meaning and purpose of conjunctions.
3.1.3. Exploring compound sentences in the picture book.
3.1.4. Learning a conjunction connects and coordinates two or more clauses.
3.1.5. Give a few sets of sentences and discuss how they can connect together using a conjunction.
3.1.6. Describe a weekend-activity to a peer in a compound sentence using one conjunction, and write down the sentence
3.1.6.1. Topic 2 - focus on interactive talk and how it supports children to learn to read and write.
3.1.6.2. Topic 5 - Phonics
3.2. Literature
3.2.1. What was Nicholas trying to do? What was the problem? Why is that a problem?
3.2.2. The pictures enhance the plot. What were Nicholas's fears? What are the colours that represent his fear?
3.2.3. How did he try to make his cat feels scared? The feature of imagination, were those things really there?
3.2.4. How does the story end?
3.3. Literacy
3.3.1. Make connection between texts and images.
3.3.2. Connect story scenario to students' own experience.
3.3.2.1. Topic 6 - becoming highly literate individuals with a real identity as a literate person.
3.3.3. predicting, asking and answering questions as they read, and summarising and reviewing meaning.
3.3.4. making valid inferences using information in a text and students’ own prior knowledge.
4. Suitable Year 2 English Curriculum
4.1. Language
4.1.1. Understand that spoken, visual and written forms of language are different modes of communication with different features and their use varies according to the audience, purpose, context and cultural background (ACELA1460)
4.1.2. Identify language that can be used for appreciating texts and the qualities of people and things (ACELA1462)
4.1.3. Recognise that capital letters signal proper nouns and commas are used to separate items in lists (ACELA1465
4.1.4. Understand that simple connections can be made between ideas by using a compound sentence with two or more clauses usually linked by a coordinating conjunction (ACELA1467)
4.1.5. Understand that nouns represent people, places, concrete objects and abstract concepts; that there are three types of nouns: common, proper and pronouns; and that noun groups/phrases can be expanded using articles and adjectives (ACELA1468)
4.1.6. Identify visual representations of characters’ actions, reactions, speech and thought processes in narratives, and consider how these images add to or contradict or multiply the meaning of accompanying words (ACELA1469)
4.2. Litreture
4.2.1. Discuss how depictions of characters in print, sound and images reflect the contexts in which they were created (ACELT1587)
4.2.2. Compare opinions about characters, events and settings in and between texts (ACELT1589)
4.2.3. Discuss the characters and settings of different texts and explore how language is used to present these features in different ways (ACELT1591 )
4.2.4. Innovate on familiar texts by experimenting with character, setting or plot (ACELT1833
4.3. Literacy
4.3.1. Use interaction skills including initiating topics, making positive statements and voicing disagreement in an appropriate manner, speaking clearly and varying tone, volume and pace appropriately (ACELY1789
4.3.2. Rehearse and deliver short presentations on familiar and new topics (ACELY1667
4.3.3. Identify the audience of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts
4.3.3.1. Create short imaginative, informative and persuasive texts using growing knowledge of text structures and language features for familiar and some less familiar audiences, selecting print and multimodal elements appropriate to the audience and purpose (ACELY1671
4.3.3.2. Re-read and edit text for spelling, sentence-boundary punctuation and text structure (ACELY1672
4.3.3.3. Write legibly and with growing fluency using unjoined upper case and lower case letters (ACELY1673
4.3.3.4. Construct texts featuring print, visual and audio elements using software, including word processing programs (ACELY1674