Dialogic Reading with Just Enough!

The Book

Just Enough!

Written & illustrated by Steven Huynh, published by Steven De GC

The narrative encourages students to take only what is needed (ACPPS006, ACPPS022 – Foundation to Year 2 Health and Physical Education), reinforcing fairness in sharing resources like classroom materials. It also explores the negative consequences of overuse by addressing the basic needs of animals—food, water, and shelter (ACSSU002 – Foundation Year Science) —demonstrating how overuse impacts wildlife and habitats. Highlighting environmental changes caused by resource depletion (ACSSU019 – Year 1 Science), fostering the awareness of sustainability. With its rich themes of sharing and environmental stewardship, this story inspires young learners to adopt mindful, responsible habits in their daily lives.

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Resource creator

Steven Huynh

Subject

English Language and Literacy,

Level

Foundation, Year 1, Year 2,

Learning Intentions

• Students are learning to make predictions and connections between the illustrations and text to deepen their understanding of the story.

Successful Criteria

• Students can share their feelings, opinions, and understanding of the text by analysing the teacher’s guided reading.

Curriculum Alignment

ACELT1783 8.4 (English Language and Literacy Foundation): Share feelings and thoughts about the events and characters in texts

• talking about stories and authors, choosing favourites, discussing how students feel about what happens in stories
• using art forms and beginning forms of writing to express personal responses to literature and film experiences
• talking about people, events and ideas in texts, enabling students to connect them to their own experiences and to express their own opinions about what is depicted

ACELY1650 8.4 (English Language and Literacy Foundation): Use comprehension strategies to understand and discuss texts listened to, viewed or read independently

• talking about the meanings in texts listened to, viewed and read
• visualising elements in a text (for example drawing an event or character from a text read aloud)
• providing a simple, correctly-sequenced retelling of narrative texts
• relating one or two key facts from informative texts
• finding a key word in a text to answer a literal question
• making links between events in a text and students’ own experiences
• making an inference about a character’s feelings
• discussing and sequencing events in stories

ACELY1660 8.4 (English Language and Literacy Year 1): Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features

• using elements in books and screen texts, for example illustrations, diagrams, sound and movement, to support reading
• making connections between the text and students’ own experiences, and between information in print and images
• finding key information in a text
• making inferences about characters’ feelings and motives
• building knowledge about the topic of the text and learning new vocabulary before and during reading
• making predictions from the cover, from illustrations and at points in the text before reading on
• retelling the events or key information in the text orally, in writing and/or through digital or arts media

ACELY1670 8.4 (English Language and Literacy Year 2): Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to analyse texts by drawing on growing knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal text structures

• making connections between the text and students’ own experiences and experiences with other texts, comparing authors’ differing point of view on a topic
• making connections between information in print and images
• building on and using prior knowledge and vocabulary
• making valid inferences using information in a text and students’ own prior knowledge
• predicting, asking and answering questions as they read, and summarising and reviewing meaning

Materials

The book Just Enough! by Steven Huynh

Instructions

Below are some features that teachers and/or parents can use to create prompts while reading. However, feel free to discuss anything you believe is important to children.

The purpose of Dialogic Reading is to make reading a more enjoyable and interactive experience. Click here to learn how Dialogic Reading works.

Example

Teacher/Parent: How did Kookaburra know the rain was coming?
Child/ren: He was looking at the dark clouds.

Feature(s)	Inference(s)
The Southwest	The southern part of Western Australia.
Kookabarra looking at the dark clouds	The rain was coming.
The disappearance of the quandong fruit from the tree	Emu hoarded all the food.
Emu’s stomach was growling	Emu was hungry.
The meadow turning yellow	Fresh grass was taken by the mob (of kangaroos)
The rock dam	(The rest of) the river would be drained away.
BARREN!	Trees were dying. They couldn’t produce anymore fruit.
Possum moving from tree to tree for his shelter	He lost his home, as the trees were dying.
Then No Air!	There would be no air without trees.
The animals’ actions in the end	They righted the wrong, showing the idea of respectful relationship with their peer animals.
Just Enough!	One’s self-awareness about sharing and the decent use of resources.