Our Strategic Plan clearly identifies the importance of, and our commitment to, developing the Literacy skills of all our students. The English curriculum specifically identifies required skills in the areas of reading and viewing, writing, and speaking and listening. The learning/ teaching in these areas are interrelated and do not occur in isolation. Our daily literacy block runs for 2 hours each Monday – Friday and we integrate Literacy and Numeracy into our Hands on Learning sessions on Friday. We always endeavour to provide our students with authentic, rich and purposeful learning opportunities within Literacy, so they develop strong real-life connections and applications of their learning. The essential components of the Literacy Program are:

• A daily 2 hour literacy session
• Small group explicit teaching at point of need
• Strong partnership between school and home. Parents are encouraged to assist with the literacy program in each classroom and assist children to complete take home tasks.
• Home Reading as an essential part of our school’s reading program.

 

Talk for Writing – a school wide approach to teaching writing

We teach students writing using the Talk for Writing process of “Imitation – Innovation – Invention”. Quality writing is created by first expanding and developing students’ oral language skills and then teaching the necessary steps for exceptional sentence, paragraph and text construction. Students learn to orally recite and act out popular stories through listening and reading. Students are taught to use the underlying structure of the original text to create their own version on a different topic. Over time, they move towards independent writing as they create texts about their own topics.

VCOP

VCOP gives students the confidence and the understanding to develop control of a higher level writers voice. The VCOP student writing pathways are used by our students to monitor their progress and set learning goals for writing. Click here to access information for parents about the program.

Sound Waves – a school wide approach to teaching spelling

Implemented across the whole school is Sound Waves, a spelling program based on phonemic awareness. Students learn strategies to decode and encode the written word, and important concepts such as rhyming, tense, prefixes, suffixes, Greek and Latin roots and ultimately leading to a genuine understanding of the mechanics of our language.