Teaching & Learning Page

Teaching and Learning Spotlight- Literacy at Surfside

You may have recently seen or heard in the news schools who are moving towards the teaching of reading through structured literacy, based on the ‘Science of Reading’.  Over five years ago now, our school began the journey of moving from a balanced literacy to a structured literacy approach.

There are a few misconceptions about what the ‘Science of Reading’ actually means. The body of work referred to as the ‘Science of Reading’ is not a philosophy or just a specific component of instruction, such as phonics. It is based on thousands of worldwide studies from a range of areas including cognitive science, neuroscience, and educational psychology on how the brain learns to read. Structured Literacy is the Science of Reading in practice within the classroom. Instruction is  direct, explicit, structured and systematic. It is embedded in all important components of literacy, including both foundational skills (reading of words) and higher-level skills (understanding of words). See graphic below. 

This research has shown that there are six key components that contribute to successful reading. Because of the importance of these components, they have become known as the 'Big Six’: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. During our structured literacy block we incorporate each of these areas.

An example of some students learning to read (decode) using decodable books.