Learning & Teaching
Leader: Lauren Bennett
Literacy Lesson Update!
Over the last 3 years at St Patrick’s all teachers have been working very hard to refine and enhance our Literacy block in both F-2 and 3-6. Our focus on literacy is to ensure all students are receiving a tailored literacy program and encourage them to develop a love of all literacy components.
In our Literacy lessons across all classrooms we hope to ensure our students are following the same routine with consistency, opportunities and engagement. To do so, all classrooms ensure they are doing the following and also focus on supporting our learners through a gradual release of responsibility.
What does our literacy program look like in F-2?
In Foundation-2 the students follow the phonics Scope and Sequence from the LLLL program. This Program is called ‘Little Learners Love Literacy’ and it focuses on teaching the letters sounds and digraphs in conjunction with decodable readers for those sounds. Also in our Literacy program our F-2 students complete a text based unit each term.
The 2-hour literacy block follows the same routine each day and includes:
- Heggerty
- Daily Review/Phonics Lesson
- Phonics Focus
- Reading Fluency
- Read Aloud
- Text-Based Unit
What does our literacy program look like in 3-6?
In Grades 3-6 the students follow the spelling mastery program. Spelling Mastery is a six-level Direct Instruction series that teaches students dependable spelling skills by blending three approaches: the phonemic approach, the whole word approach and the morphemic approach. Also in the 3-6 literacy program students complete a text-based unit each term.
The 2-hour literacy block follows the same routine each day and includes:
- Daily Review/Phonics Lesson
- Spelling Mastery
- Reading Fluency
- Read Aloud
- Handwriting
- Text-Based Unit
What are the benefits of ‘Reading Fluency’ unit?
Over the last 12-months a big focus in the literacy space has been READING FLUENCY. To help support teachers and students with the completion of fluency pairs the teachers created ‘student friendly’ documents to help with their learning of fluency pairs. The documents are:
- Reading Fluency Expectations F-2 and 3-6.
- Reading Fluency Feedback F-2 and 3-6.
There are a great number of benefits to reading fluency. The reason it is incorporated into our literacy blocks are as follows:
