Research Based FeaturesThe Flying Start to Literacy books contain research-based features to scaffold reading success.
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These features aid in scaffolding reading development and decrease the cognitive load for children learning to read.
Scroll down to read more about the Flying Start to Literacy features and how they are used in the program
to support early literacy success.
Key vocabulary
Key vocabulary represents words of high interest to children and reflect their experiences.
The topics addressed in the sets of key vocabulary support children to successfully read books about things of interest to them, and topics often covered in science, social studies and health curriculums in the first two to three years of school.
Flying Start to Literacy exposes children to sets of words organized by topic. Initially the focus is on words that form part of children’s everyday spoken language.
This vocabulary is presented in the Vocabulary Starter cards and is revisited extensively in the first three Stages of the program – Levels 1-10 - enabling children to gain automatic recall of these words.
Each Vocabulary Starter card introduces seven words. Topics covered include transportation, mini beasts, farm and zoo animals and families.
From Stage Two of the program new key vocabulary is introduced in relation to each topic. (For example: Spiders Stage 2, Level 6: spider, web, silk, legs, insects.)
New key vocabulary is presented within both books within the pair to give each child multiple opportunities to become familiar with the word and to master automatic recall of the words.
All new key vocabulary words in each Stage can be decoded using the phonic skills related to that Stage.
The Lesson Plans outline a range of activities that can be used to engage children in hearing words, using them, manipulating them semantically, and writing and playing with them so that they are more likely to learn and retain the new vocabulary.
High-frequency words
Flying Start to Literacy focuses on developing children’s ability to automatically recognise and use high frequency words.
These are words such as I, and, is, and the, that occur with high regularity in writing.
These words are a major focus in the first three Stages of Flying Start to Literacy because they support fluency. Familiarity with high frequency words will also be a support to students when they come to new and unfamiliar words.
The words are introduced in complete sentences to support comprehension. Words are introduced in relation to the frequency they occur in writing. That is, the words that occur most often are introduced first in Stage 1: the Early Emergent Reading Stage.
The high frequency words used in Flying Start to Literacy are taken from the reading word lists of Fry and Clay, and the writing word lists of Elley and Oxford University Press.
There is a high repetition rate for new high-frequency words in the early stages of Flying start to Literacy. This is because if children are to be able to recognise these words by sight confidently, accurately and fluently they need to be read a large number of times.
Reading strategies
Flying Start to Literacy pays careful attention to the teaching of reading strategies.
Reading strategies support young readers to fully comprehend and to problem solve as they read.
Strategies include:
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knowledge about the Concepts of Print such as; Where does writing start on a page? Which way does it go? What is a word? What is a sentence? What is a full stop?
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cross checking information on a page to support comprehension
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predicting what will likely come next in a text based on understanding of what has already happened
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using meaning, syntax and visual skills to determine what new and unknown words are
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monitoring their own reading to check if errors have occurred and correcting these when they occur.
Throughout Flying Start to Literacy careful attention is given to the development of these reading strategies.
This is done within each set of Lesson Plans which detail one or more reading strategies that teachers may like to
focus on while teaching the children to read each book..
There are also suggestions for how to support readers who are not yet successfully using each strategy.
Text Types
Flying Start to Literacy provides multiple examples of a range of fiction and non-fiction text types across six developmental stages of reading.
This is to ensure that young readers have ample opportunities to understand how each text type works and to develop appropriate strategies for reading each text.
These texts also provide simple and clear models for children to use when attempting to write different types of texts.
Text types include:
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Non-fiction: Reports, explanations, historic recounts and procedures.
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Fiction: Narratives, poems plays, diaries and recounts.
Within each text type, careful attention has been given to providing appropriate examples of the text features routinely used in these texts. These include; labelled photographs, diagrams, flow charts, captions, glossaries, indexes, cast lists, etc.
The detailed Flying Start to Literacy Lesson Plans alert teachers to the text type used
in each book and highlight ways to teach children to read and write such texts.