Hi. My name's Sarah Comben.
I'm a Year 1 classroom teacher
at St Saviour's Primary School in Toowoomba.
In my classroom, I have 28 beautiful enthusiastic learners,
and together we like to learn in many different ways.
So, boys and girls, at the beginning of our project,
we started to do a bit of a plan, didn't we, about our creatures.
So with our literacy program, we have, obviously, a diverse range
of children and children with special needs in our classroom.
And we like to give them the opportunity
to meet different literacy outcomes in different ways
to suit their own learning needs.
So our project today in Grade 1
has come from a visit from a local author.
He had the children make creatures,
and the children were really engaged in this,
so I've decided to take it to the next level.
What were some of the things we thought we could write
to show different things about our creatures?
-Ils. -Shape poem.
We thought we could do shape poems. Who's doing a shape poem? Great!
What else did we think we could do?
-Christian? -Letters.
We could write a letter, couldn't we?
What's something else we could do?
-Minnie? -Description.
We could write a description.
Obviously, with our new curriculum, there's a lot of focus
on presenting different things with multi-modal text,
so we like to start that very much from an early age in our school,
giving the children the opportunity to work with technology,
because they live in a very technologically driven world.
And a lot of them are very savvy.
Fantastic! There's your shape poem.
How cool is that? Great?
It also gives them the opportunity to be problem-solvers.
It gives them the opportunity to work together
and to teach each other what they know.
So you're using the writing that you've already done in class,
and all we're doing now is actually
transcribing or typing it straight into our computer, aren't we, OK?
So let's start here. Now, you're writing a sentence, aren't you?
So what needs to be at the beginning of your typing?
CHILD: Um...
-CHILD: A capital. -SARAH: A capital.
OK, so off you go.
Good job.
Now, 'Lairy' is Hairy Lairy's name, so what does 'lairy' need as well?
-A capital. -A capital too. Good job.
Now just hold on a minute.
You know in our writing we leave a space, don't we?
-But we only leave a little space. -Yes.
You only need to touch your space bar once,
that will leave enough of a space for us to read it properly, OK?
I truly believe in giving children the opportunity
to present their work in a number of different ways
to support their strengths in literacy.
So that can be we saw children using literacy in an oral way,
we saw children transcribing from written to typed text.
Charlie, do you want to come and sit with Jordan, OK?
And you can help each other out together.
So you can read what she needs, OK?
You need to tell her if she needs a capital letter.
-Say, "Capital 'P'," OK? -OK.
With the photo stories, we had a lot of things going on.
Obviously some children used the Tux Paint
to help them with their pictures.
We had other children who were taking photos.
We had children designing and also planning for that design,
so obviously that also fits into our literacy.
And also we're giving them the opportunity
to present their text in multi-modal ways.