At Spring Gully Primary School literacy instruction is an integral part of each day. Our program ensures the explicit teaching of the key areas of Reading and Viewing, Writing, Speaking and Listening as outlined in the Victorian Curriculum. We recognise that the most up to date research has shown there are six key components which must be covered when teaching reading:
Our students engage in daily activities designed to foster their learning in each of the six areas, including regular exposure to knowledge rich texts.
Grade Prep – 2
Our grade Prep - 2 students participate in a learning program which aims to establish strong foundational reading skills. Students engage daily in the Heggerty program to develop their phonemic awareness skills, with our primary focus being to develop blending (decoding) and segmenting (encoding) skills to support reading and writing/spelling.
The Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL) program is used to develop student’s knowledge of the 44 phonemes (sounds) and their corresponding graphemes or grapheme combinations (letters). Students practise independent reading skills using LLLL decodable texts, where they are only reading words in which they have been taught the sounds for and a small amount of heart words (words which cannot be phonetically decoded). Our junior students regularly participate in fluency pairs and also join in whole-class readings, where fluency is modelled by the teacher. Students vocabulary and comprehension skills are developed through whole-class text reading, complemented by a range of opportunities to practice these skills independently or within a small group.
Spelling, handwriting and sentence development skills are taught explicitly each day. Students engage in daily writing practise for a variety of different purposes and genres.
Grade 3 – 6
Students in Grade 3-6 transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. We have developed strong links between what is learnt during the younger years and build on this in years 3 – 6. Students continue to engage in a knowledge based English curriculum where they read and write a wide range of texts while exploring different concepts and topics. They continue to refine the key literacy skills in the areas of fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
In Grades 3 – 6 we use the Sound Waves Literacy program to support students to develop their knowledge of spelling patterns, morphology and etymology.
Students receive writing instruction at sentence, paragraph and whole text level throughout their learning journey. This includes the explicit teaching of handwriting, correct letter formation and touch-typing skills.
We are committed to all students at Spring Gully Primary School reaching their full potential and for some students this may mean the need for extra support. We offer students who are deemed to be requiring extra support the following Response to Intervention (RTI) model to ensure we are catering for all student’s needs:
Tier 1 - Whole class evidence-based instruction
Tier 2 - Small group support and instruction for students, identified as requiring extra support
Tier 3 – Individual or small-group, intensive targeted instruction for students who require this level of support.
The LLLL program is used as a tier 2 intervention for literacy in Grade Prep – 2, whilst MacqLit supports our students in Grades 2-6.