English Course
Years 1 and 2

The Australian curriculum achievement standards for Year 1 targeted in this course include:

By the end of Year 1, students interact with others, and listen to and create short spoken texts including recounts of stories. They share ideas and retell or adapt familiar stories, recount or report on events or experiences, and express opinions using a small number of details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They sequence ideas and use language features including topic-specific vocabulary and features of voice.

They read, view and comprehend texts, monitoring meaning and making connections between the depiction of characters, settings and events, and to personal experiences. They identify the text structures of familiar narrative texts, and their language features and visual features.

They create short written and/or multimodal texts including recounts of stories with events and characters. They write simple sentences with sentence boundary punctuation and capital letters for proper nouns. They use topic-specific vocabulary.

The Australian curriculum achievement standards for Year 2 targeted in this course include:

By the end of Year 2, students interact with others, and listen to and create spoken texts including stories. They share ideas, topic knowledge and appreciation of texts. They organise and link ideas, and use language features including topic-specific vocabulary.

They read, view and comprehend texts, identifying literal and inferred meaning, and how ideas are presented through characters and events. They describe how similar topics and information are presented through the structure of narrative texts, and identify their language features and visual features.

They create written and/or multimodal texts including stories to inform, express an opinion, adapt an idea or narrate for audiences. They use text structures to organise and link ideas for a purpose. They punctuate simple and compound sentences. They use topic-specific vocabulary.

Words are the building blocks of literacy. Without the right words, students cannot think or articulate their ideas. Therefore the lesson sequence in Unit 1 is:

1. What is a literary device? Understand that literary devices in writing are like the special effects in movies. They are devices - things - that do something.
2. Access the TeacherTalk curriculum-aligned Glossary Of Literary Devices with definitions, examples, and simple English codes we call Eng-Codes®.
3. Learn to Eng-Code® a text with literary devices to make learning visible.
4. Extract language from a classroom text, create a topic-specific language journal, and develop vocabulary.
5. Transform published language to make it your own.

Students gather vocabulary from their classroom texts and learn how to use this language to excel in academic writing. These skills transfer to life beyond the classroom, preparing students to communicate with confidence in any situation.

In Unit 2, we apply the skills learned in Unit 1 to comprehend texts, to hear an author's message, and craft a narrative response that excels with the curriculum achievement standards.

The teaching sequence in Unit 2 is:

1. What is a narrative? Let's unpack the curriculum definition.
2. Gather plot ideas from literature and life.
3. Plan a powerful narrative using our curriculum-aligned scaffold that focuses students on the resolution - because that's where writers make their point.
4. Cast colourful characters and portray them using literary devices.
5. Scout for symbolic settings and portray them using literary devices.
6. Draft, mark & edit for success using the TeacherTalk student-friendly marking guide.
7. Prepare for NAPLAN.

Each of these include a short sequence of lessons, tips to overcome common challenges, examples of successful student work, and plenty of practice, extension and analysis activities.

Take your child on an adventure through literature to understand the elements of story-telling and prepare for classroom assessments. 

Beware! You may discover yourself cast as a hero ... or a villain ... in your child's next story. Enjoy!