Author(s): Julie Haydon

Big Books

The Oxford Literacy big books are the ideal resource for whole-class shared reading. They explore and extend the themes introduced in the guided reading titles by allowing for the explicit teaching of text types with concepts, visual literacy and language features to engage and extend early years students. Shared reading - Reading the visualsReading the visuals is a classroom program that provides explicit instruction on how visual information is constructed and deconstructed to assist comprehension. These are some of the questions that can be explored through whole class and small group learning using the innovative and fully interactive whiteboard software that is included with all the big books: How do you read the visual information in the text? What meaning is added to the written text? Which visual communicator adds the most meaning to a particular topic and text type? By focusing on the theme of the big book (eg values), students are guided through learning opportunities to manipulate and create their own visual information to suit the purpose of the range of text types featured.