Creating a rubric or some sort of final objective for what word consciousness might look like in Year 1 students, and how you can gauge metacognition.

Use the rubric to mark off how each activity/task addresses a need

Think about the different ways the literature tells us children learn words (eg multiple encounters, strategies, context, incidental, wide reading…) 

Use of different text forms (picture books, big books, video, images etc)

Going back to basics - do they know what a "word" is? What does "word" mean

Metalinguistic awareness: Do they understand that a word (spoken, then written) represents something? Can they manipulate words? Can they replace a word with another word?

in a picture book, what clues are there for emotions (ie do they write the word frustrated? Can you see that the character is frustrated? Visuals, colour, size...)

Build on words - start with vocabulary you can build meaning on (eg simple words that they may have some knowledge of, moving on to completely new words happy, sad, angry, scared - excited, embarrassed, jealous, proud etc)

Look at root word + variations (eg excite, excited, exciting, excites, unexcited, unexciting, parts of speech)