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" DET site page assist learning from home. They will continue to update this page in the coming weeks. On this page: Learning continuity contingency planning: early childhood and Learning continuity contingency planning: schools Online options Offline options Tips for remote curriculum delivery  Learning continuity contingency planning: early childhood When planning for children's learning continuity in the event of closure, early childhood education and care services may consider: identifying ways early childhood teachers and educators can initiate group or individual contact with children to maintain learning opportunities implementing activities with children by using available technologies maintaining contact with families to discuss and track the wellbeing of children and discuss the progress of children's development identifying ways educators can improve the implementation and documentation of the service's program and maintain educator practice. There are resources services can provide to support parents and carers to engage in learning activities with their children at home: Play-based learning for pre-schoolers - provides suggestions for good structured and unstructured play experiences for 3 - 5 year olds How to build literacy skills from birth to year 2 - includes tips on how to help build children's skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing How to build numeracy skills from birth to year 2 - includes tips on how to build children's skills in maths, measurement and patterns Building STEM skills for children - includes ways to engage children with STEM related experiences. Raising Children Network also has a range of learning activities for pre-schoolers. It includes tips and ideas as well as videos of drawing, writing, storytelling, counting and other activities that can be done at home. Services may also want to give parents information about talking to their children about COVID-19. For example: UNICEF's How to talk to

"Children are heartily encouraged to read in their early years of school. However, once students have mastered this skill and they move from learning to read, to reading to learn, the role of pleasure in the activity can be forgotten. If reading is just seen as a tool for learning, the will to read may not be fostered in young people. Recreational book reading involves voluntary reading for pleasure, and research suggests that students in Australia and internationally are reading less over time."

Many school libraries work hard to try to keep all students but especially boys coming to the Library, reading books and engaging with what they are reading. Many of the strategies work for girls as well as boys and, although an aversion to reading isn't gender specific, every time you investigate some research it always shows that boys read less. This article explains some strategies one library has tried in order to combat boys disengaging from reading. She is not saying these will work for your school, but she has noticed a big uptake in the number of boys in the Library and of course the number of books they are borrowing.

"10 activities to use with any nonfiction book or other informational text. The goal was to get kids more engaged in reading. They are simple but effective and could be adapted in a variety Of ways.

"A post that looks at reading reflection prompts and forms. A few different ideas for assisting students to get "points" in any reading program. They are a student-centered approach it takes, and could be useful across content areas. " It's primarily about the craft of writing and elements of style, but 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and several others would work after reading almost anything."

Printable Reading Bingo containing 24 reading challenges that will help you read more and have more fun with it.

Teach Your Monster to Read is a great series of online games designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The website gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students help learn to read through the course of the games.

To assist with motivating readers this site offers some printable reading logs that can be coloured in as books are read.

"After reading a novel, actual changes linger in the brain, at least for a few days, report researchers. Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, appear in the journal Brain Connectivity."

Make the goal for a literacy-rich classroom and expose students to as many different types of books as possible in order for them to continue to grow in their love of reading or to find an entry point for reading. Lots of ideas mentioned here

ReadWriteThink Notetaker. Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information.

"A nice class activity when the books being read by the students have specific locations for the settings. You can create a book map using My Maps from Google to highlight the settings in which these texts took place."

How to teach text structures for better reading comprehension and improved retention. Teachers of history, science, and other subjects are now expected to weave literacy instruction into their teaching of content. But how should they do that? What are the most effective ways to help students learn to read challenging content-area texts? This article breaks down the research behind explicit teaching of text structures and includes a video that shows how to do it (Great for content-area literacy)

"An anchor chart that shows the progression from a 1-star Post-it note to a 4-star Post-it note for upper elementary students based on the Say Something Post-it Note reading strategy."

Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."

Links to many ideas

"The Cube Creator. Summarizing information is an important postreading and prewriting activity that helps students synthesize what they have learned. The interactive Cube Creator offers four options: Boigraphy creator, mystery creator, story cube and create-your-own cube"

A comprehensive post about how you could approach the 2014 theme "Connect to reading"

From ReadWriteThink, the Trading Cards app could give students and alternative way to share what they understand about the characters and places from the books they have been reading. The fields/categories that can be documented include: fictional person, real person, fictional place, real place, object, event and vocabulary word. Each category has specific guiding questions to assist students. Space is limited so students have to be able to demonstrate their ideas succinctly and only include the most important information. The app is easy to use, has good "how-to" information, auto-saves and can be printed or emailed.

A good article about developing literacy skills. "All Australian children and young people becoming literate I believe it is vital we understand and define the complexity of literacy. Literacy encompasses the knowledge and skills students need to access, understand, analyse and evaluate information, make meaning, express thoughts and emotions, present ideas and opinions, interact with others and participate in activities at school and in their lives beyond school. "