Learning First Science

Focus on Reading

Learning First Science integrates extensive reading and writing across the curriculum, with increasing complexity across year levels.

THE BRIDGE TO LITERACY

Learning First Science improves reading comprehension that lifts learning across the curriculum

The student workbook requires extensive writing. Science Stories and experiments provide 10 stories for each science unit to reinforce science knowledge, build broader science understand, and improve reading comprehension.

Science Stories are short, knowledge-rich texts woven throughout the Learning First Science suite. They take the scientific ideas students are learning and place them in an interesting real-world, historical or natural context. A story might explore the daily life of a working scientist, the longest experiment on record, or how people used science in the past and use it now. Rather than introducing disconnected facts, the stories show students that science helps us explain the world around us.

Each Science Stories book contains 40 stories directly linked to the four units taught in the year. There is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and a wide variety of text types - explanations, biographies, comics, procedures, news articles and opinion pieces. Accompanying the stories are questions for the teacher to use to guide discussion and connect the text to the science, along with the morphology of specific scientific vocabulary for use in lessons on language conventions.

Across the years, Science Stories help students to:

  • Build broad substantive knowledge in science

  • See how scientific ideas apply beyond the classroom

  • Encounter key vocabulary repeatedly, in meaningful contexts

  • Make connections between concepts taught across a unit

  • Develop listening, speaking and reading comprehension

  • Build curiosity and wonder about the world

  • Strengthen long-term understanding by revisiting knowledge through memorable examples

The stories are a bridge between science and literacy. Students hear and discuss rich informational texts, encounter scientific vocabulary, and practise listening, speaking and comprehension while continuing to build their science knowledge. Because the ideas are embedded in memorable people, places, animals, events and problems, the stories also make abstract concepts more concrete and easier to remember.

CURRICULUM-LINKED READING

Stories that make science stick

Beautifully illustrated books that reinforce science content, build reading comprehension, and support vocabulary and morphology instruction.

Teachers consistently tell us that quality texts linked to curriculum areas are hard to find, and these fill that gap. The accompanying experiments and activities bring these texts to life and let students engage in science at home, where it reinforces classroom learning, communicates the curriculum, and meaningfully engages families in their child's education.

SCIENCE & READING TOGETHER

Learning cycle that improves learning in science and reading comprehension

Learning First Science creates a cycle that improves learning and reading comprehension across the curriculum. The stories reinforce the knowledge learnt in science classes. A cycle is created that lifts learning.

The stories reinforce the knowledge learnt in science classes. This builds knowledge and supports reading comprehension. In turn, this supports further learning across the curriculum, and also allows students to better access new learning in science. The research is clear that we need to improve and support reading of different genres of increasing complexity in science - not just English.

Science understanding and reading comprehension are built at the same time.

Learning is supported across subjects, not just in science.

How the model supports literacy

Science instruction
Children learn the science itself - the concepts, the vocabulary, and the way scientists explain things.

Science stories
They meet that knowledge again in rich texts across a range of genres, in a meaningful context that inspires them and sparks curiosity.

Reading comprehension
Background knowledge is the strongest predictor of the comprehension. The more a child knows, the easier the next complex text becomes.