English  

Collaborating to improve our practice

At Windang Public School our teachers are passionate about improving teaching practice. This term we have been deeply exploring 'reading fluency' and have been implementing our learning in classrooms to provide students with the opportunities to hone their fluency when reading. 

We have been exploring the elements of fluency including expression, automaticity, rhythm and phrasing, and smoothness. Evidence shows that repeated readings increases fluency, which enables readers to attend more actively to comprehending the meaning of texts. Our students know that practice makes progress, and through practice we become increasingly expert in skills. The Tim Rasinski quotes below demonstrate the importance of reading fluency.

All teachers have been collaborating in team meetings and planning sessions to share and reflect on their fluency lessons, discuss student progress, and further adjust and refine their practice. Throughout term 2, teachers have engaged in co-planning and co-teaching to support each other and students to improve reading outcomes for each and every student.  

Our Windang students have been highly engaged and are becoming increasingly aware of the skills needed to become expert readers. The photos below  reflect some of the learning happening in our classrooms. 

In stages 1-3, students are increasing their understanding of phrasing and how this influences when we should pause, how long we should pause, and how this impacts the rhythm of a text. Better understanding of the phrases within a sentence has also assisted students to improve comprehension and read aloud with greater meaningful expression. 

Kindergarten and Year 1 students are focused on developing their fluency through improving their decoding and blending reading skills to become increasingly able to automatically recognise phonemes and words with accuracy. Deslea, the puppet teaching assistant, has enjoyed helping our Parrots and Kookaburras clearly understand what decoding and blending means to help inform their reading skills and progress.

Throughout our fluency pairs, all students have been learning to give accurate feedback that helps their partner identify what they are doing well and how to improve. 

It has been wonderful to see students embrace fluency learning at our wonderful school. All students should be be very proud of the their improvement in skills such as reading fluently, listening to their partner read, reading along, reading aloud, and providing feedback.  Keep up the great learning dispositions of being reflective learners who are open-minded!

Carinya Barkley

Literacy Leader - Assistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction