In Level A, students begin to engage, participate and receive communication with known adults, teachers and peers. Opportunities are provided for students to explore English knowledge, understanding, skills and processes through everyday experiences, personal interests and significant events. Students are exposed to various alternative and augmentative communication systems because adults model...
In Level A, students begin to engage, participate and receive communication with known adults, teachers and peers. Opportunities are provided for students to explore English knowledge, understanding, skills and processes through everyday experiences, personal interests and significant events. Students are exposed to various alternative and augmentative communication systems because adults model and reinforce communication. Picture symbols are utilised for making choices and to represent real objects and activities. Students become aware of their physical state and are moving from reflex responses to intentional responses. Students are initially encouraged to develop control over their actions and mannerisms and to communicate within the social environment by reacting and responding to their immediate environment with as much independence as possible.
In Level A, students begin to show interest in the world around them, awareness of others and of social interactions. Students’ actions and mannerisms are treated as communication and ‘interpreted’ and reacted to by adults. Students are provided with experiences that engage, support and extend their learning, including the use of verbal and non-verbal communication and making choices.
Students experience a variety of texts for enjoyment and to extend their experiences of the world around them. They listen to, experience and view spoken, written, visual and multimodal texts, with the primary purpose of engaging, entertaining and informing. These texts include traditional oral texts, picture books, various types of stories, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts and dramatic performances. They experience shared reading, viewing and storytelling using a range of literary texts, and respond to the entertaining nature of literature.
Literary texts that support and enable Level A students to become readers include predictable texts, stories, visual displays and information, social interactions and experiences. These texts involve straightforward sequences of events and everyday happenings with recognisable, realistic or imaginary characters. Informative texts present a small amount of new content about familiar topics of interest.
Students create a range of texts coactively. They begin to develop their functional motors required for written communication. Students develop their core strength and shoulder stability. They coactively use different materials for drawing and develop their gripping skills.
By the end of Level A, students react to a range of spoken, written and multimodal texts from familiar contexts. They respond to images of familiar people, objects or events. They fleetingly maintain eye contact with a person or object. They enjoy reading material as it is being read/experienced, shown or told. They can track objects, people or images for a short period of time.
When experiencing coactive writing activities, students make choices between objects and images and accept and reject objects and activities. Students develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination and they move their hands in response to tactile stimuli. Students can demonstrate their grasp and can hold an object briefly when it is placed in their hand.
Students listen to and react to some familiar objects, people, words and sounds within the environment by turning head, looking, reaching out and/or vocalising. They respond to their name and to familiar items when named. Students show an interest in others and an awareness of everyday social interactions such as greetings by using gesture or vocalisation. They recognise that their reaction can change others’ behaviour. They can choose between objects, images and activities and accept or reject an object or activity. They withdraw attention if no longer interested in a topic of communication. Students attempt to imitate sounds. They have some consistent vocalisation and gestures in response to different people, activities and environments.
