Learning
Reading
We are unashamedly a Science of Reading school, using a range of approaches that ensures students succeed as readers. In the early years, students learn to decode via a Systemic Synthetic Phonics program, Sounds Write, recommended by SPELD Victoria as the best program to teach letter-sound correspondence. We support students with daily phonemic awareness and fluency interventions to boost oral language and ensure readiness for independent reading. Our students also explicitly explore vocabulary that directly links to our diverse Units of Work that span each term, linking to research that shows this strategy improves both reading comprehension and background knowledge acquisition. Each day our students in lower years are read to and with, from a diverse range of high quality fiction and non-fiction books. The over-arching guide for us is Scarborough’s Reading Rope, which ensures both word recognition and language comprehension are woven together to produce competent readers.
As students progress into the upper years, we move from learning to read to reading to learn. As well as serial reads that promote a collective understanding of rich literature, students read independently, learning text processing strategies that will keep their learning trajectory focused after they leave us for high school. Vocabulary is an ongoing and core focus, helping students build a deep schema of the world around them with an accompanying nuance.
We assess our students using a range of evidence based assessments, including Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT) from ACER, the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (YARC), Sounds Write Assessments, combined with regular formative assessments within the classroom. Our goal is to have every child leave us as a literate, critical thinker, whose curiosity and love of reading will ensure they become life long passionate learners.
Writing
Just as with Reading, Writing requires many strands of skills woven together to become competent and powerful communicators. Our students write regularly and purposefully, with our Writing approach ensuring that our students love this subject area. As students move through the school, we have a focus on handwriting so that their cognitive load is focused on their ideas, vocabulary and sentence structure, rather than letter formation. Students learn about diverse genres of writing through connection to our termly units of work, but are able to demonstrate agency as they find their own voice.
We assess our students using a range of evidence based assessments, including Comparative Judgement assessments from No More Marking (both written and multiple choice), regular year level showcases and feedback events, combined with regular formative assessments in the classroom throughout the writing process.
