At Mount Blowhard Primary School we understand that literacy is central to the learning and development of children, as literacy skills are vital to supporting all learning. Our school uses a Structured Literacy approach to teach reading, writing and spelling which involves explicit and systematic teaching of the fundamental skills around literacy instruction. Our literacy program has been developed to align with evidence-based methods and current reading research, and is continually delivering outstanding results for all students. Reading research indicates that there are 5 key areas of reading. These include:
Phonemic Awareness Phonics Fluency Vocabulary Comprehension |
PHONEMIC AWARENESS & PHONICS
We have a strong focus on building phonemic awareness skills in our F - 2 classes, with daily phonemic awareness activities such as blending, segmenting, sound isolation and manipulation. Our junior classes undertake daily systematic synthetic phonics lessons where they are explicitly and systematically taught letter-sound relationships and spelling patterns. A review of previous learning is built into every lesson to ensure mastery is achieved for all students. FLUENCY
Students participate in daily fluency lessons. Junior classes focus on sounding out words with their current letter-sound knowledge, and read a range of word lists, sentences and decodable texts. Senior classes focus on reading more detailed texts with accuracy, appropriate rate and prosody. VOCABULARY & COMPREHENSION
All classes from F - 6 teach vocabulary explicitly. Careful planning is undertaken to ensure that our vocabulary teaching is linked to other subject areas such as Science, Geography, History and Wellbeing. Students are taught the meaning of words and then complete activities to practice using these words in context to strengthen their understanding. Senior classes explore word origins and the use of prefixes and suffixes in changing the meaning of base words. Comprehension is taught through the use of complex texts. We aim to build the background knowledge that students have on topics by selecting a wide variety of texts that align to other subject areas. In our junior classes, teachers read these texts to students. This ensure students are accessing complex language structures, advanced content and sophisticated vocabulary. Senior classes use a mixture of teacher reading, student reading and partner reading. Across all grades, students are supported to think deeply about the themes and knowledge in texts, while using complex language structures and vocabulary to enhance their literal and inferential understanding. |
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WRITING
Handwriting is an essential component in our writing instruction at Mount Blowhard and is explicitly taught from F - 6. Foundation students begin explicit handwriting instruction using lined dotted thirds from the moment they begin school. Our handwriting instruction is directly linked to our phonics teaching to ensure students can begin writing words early in their literacy development. Junior classes focus on mastering formation and size of all lower and upper case letters so that senior classes can focus on joined handwriting to promote fluency when writing longer texts. We teach writing in a systematic and progressive manner across the school, beginning with single words and sentences in our junior years and moving to paragraphs and text types in our senior classes. We closely link our reading comprehension and writing instruction to ensure students are using the knowledge and vocabulary that they are acquiring in other subject areas. |