Reading in Prep-Year 2 2023 – Little Learners Love Literacy

                    Prep-Year 2 2023– Little Learners Love Literacy

We are excited to announce that in 2023 we will be implementing an approach in Prep- Year 2 called Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL).  This approach is designed to strengthen our students' phonological awareness and knowledge of phonics to help them read, write and spell with confidence. 

Click here to watch our videoexplaining how LLLL will operate at Hillsmeade PS in 2023 and how it will impact classroom learning and home reading.

What is LLLL?

Little Learners Love Literacy is an explicit and sequential literacy approach for teaching children to read, write and spell with confidence based on the Science of Reading – a huge body of research that is currently prominent in educational circles. Many schools in South East Melbourne adopt the LLLL approach, and we have already built connections with three of these schools to help us on our journey! We are confident that this approach will help your children and our students build the foundations of effective reading. 

LLLL explicitly introduces phonemes (sounds) and corresponding graphemes (written representation of sounds). It teaches children how to blend these phonemes together to read words. Concurrently, students learn to correctly form graphemes and use their letter-sound knowledge to spell and write words.

LLLL has seven stages. Whilst working in a particular stage, students will have access to texts, known as decodable readers, that contain words based predominantly on those sounds. This means students can use their knowledge to decode the words promoting fluency and developing their confidence. These readers will be utilised in the classroom for students learning within the seven stages of LLLL instead of the current texts which aren’t supported by the growing body of evidence in relation to kick starting the skill of reading. Instead of the sight words as we know them, students will learn LLLL sight words termed ‘heart words’ (words the need to ‘read by heart’) in each stage. 

In the coming weeks, your child may bring home phonics books articulating the phonemes they are working on in the classroom as well as words they can decode to practise prior to commencing take home books. Students will then move to bringing home decodable readers at their level. 

In the meantime, if you are as excited as us and would like further information, please was the video linked above and visit the LLLL website at: https://www.littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au/.

Craig Harrison                                                                                           Amanda Jones

Assistant Principal                                                                                   Learning Specialist