LITERACY at Delacombe Primary School

Further Information

 

 

 

 

Sounds-Write 

 

Sounds-Write is a highly structured, systematic phonics program based on the Science of Reading. It is a sound-to-print approach which means it is structured around the sounds of speech. Sounds-Write explicitly teaches the essential phonemic awareness skills, conceptual knowledge, and code knowledge needed for students to learn to read and spell. 

 

Sounds-Write is a highly structured, cumulative, multisensory program, and we teach both reading and spelling in every single session.

 

In Grades 4-6, students are explicitly taught the morphology of words. Morphology is the study of words, how they are formed and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyses the structure of words and parts of words, such as prefixes, base words and suffixes. Explicit teaching of morphology develops students’ understanding of words, in order to make meaning from them. 

 

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Phonological and phonemic awareness are highly predictive of early reading acquisition. Phonological awareness involves the identification and manipulation of parts of spoken language, including words, syllables, onsets and rimes, and the individual speech sounds in words (phonemes). Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that involves the specific skill of identifying and manipulating individual speech sounds within words (phonemes) and includes blending, segmenting, and playing with sounds to make new words.

 

Phonics is the mapping of speech sounds (phonemes) to letter patterns (graphemes).

 

Students from Prep to Grade 2, are explicitly taught phonological and phonemic skills including syllables, rhyme, onset and rime, segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation. These skills are revisited during a daily activation of prior knowledge in order to build mastery. Skills are taught in a sequence from basic to more complex, before they are reviewed and mastered. 

 

Students are regularly assessed on these skills so learning can be differentiated and targeted at their specific individual needs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fluency

Fluency is an integral part of early reading instruction because of its strong link to reading comprehension. As students become more proficient and fluent with their reading, they have more mental energy to focus on meaning and their understanding. 

 

Fluency is made up of 3 core components:

Accuracy is the reading of words correctly.

Rate is the speed of word identification. It is usually recorded as words read per minute.

Prosody is the sound of the reading. This can be explained as the expression used when reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Delacombe Primary School, students from Prep to Grade 6 participate in daily fluency instruction by completing one of the following activities;

• Repeated reading

• Choral reading

• Echo reading

• Paired/partner reading.

 

Reading fluency is explicitly modelled by teachers then students are provided with multiple opportunities to practise reading the same written passage over a week, whereby they are building towards mastery of their fluency and enabling them to strengthen their comprehension. 

 

Students are assessed on their fluency throughout the year through various timed assessments to determine their oral reading fluency. 

 

Reading Comprehension Strategies 

 

Students are explicitly taught reading comprehension strategies through exposure to a range of text types and topics. These rich texts are often linked to the writing focus and enable discussion and building of vocabulary. 

 

While reading rich texts, teachers explicitly model skills including: 

• Making connections - connecting the text to personal and world knowledge, as well as other texts 

• Inferring - discussing what the author means but has not explicitly stated 

• Predicting - discussing what may happen next 

• Synthesising - adjusting prior knowledge on a topic to accommodate new knowledge gained from a text 

• Analysing - noticing and discussing aspects of the writer’s craft and text structure 

• Critiquing - thinking critically about the text and sharing our opinion of the text 

• Summarising - remembering important details of a text and carrying it forward 

• Searching for and using information - noticing and using all sources of information when reading (language structure, images and visual information) 

 

Handwriting 

 

At Delacombe Primary School we use the Victorian Modern Cursive font to explicitly teach and model handwriting. Students from Prep to 6 are explicitly taught handwriting each day using dotted thirds appropriate for their grade level. Students are explicitly taught the correct pencil grip, posture and paper position, alongside correct letter formation. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Writing Model

 

The Writing Model is a whole school, strategy based approach that focuses on students using figurative language strategies in all of their writing, rather than focusing on teaching genre and text type in isolation. We scaffold student learning by explicitly modelling writing strategies providing students with the opportunity to explore the language and vocabulary related to the theme and having students write every day to practise the strategies explicitly modelled. Students are provided with an opportunity to use vocabulary and figurative language strategies in different ways by writing informative (description), imaginative (narrative) and persuasive (exposition) texts.

 

Students use prewriting strategies at sentence and paragraph level before being provided with a plan to scaffold and guide their development. The idea is to slow down the writing process to focus on the quality of the writing rather than the quantity. 

 

As the focus has moved away from teaching ‘text type’ in isolation, teachers and students have adapted the structure of TI123CC for every text they write. This structure indicates that all texts should include a title, introduction, paragraphs 1, 2 and 3, a conclusion and coda and what each of the paragraphs includes varies depending on the purpose of the text.

 

Teachers work collaboratively to create planners for students to use that outline what is to be included in each paragraph. These explicit plans also include rich vocabulary, sentence starters and good examples of figurative language strategies to remind and prompt students to include them in their texts. Often the sentence starters and vocabulary come from the prewriting work students and teachers have done prior to planning and writing their text.