Literacy News
Curriculum Day
On Monday, SKiPPS proudly welcomed 25 visiting teachers to our school and together, with our staff, we took on the role of students in a Literacy-led PhOrMeS lesson.
We were fortunate to spend the day learning from Shane Pearson, the developer of the PhOrMeS program. Shane is a speech pathologist who specialises in literacy difficulties and is a strong advocate for evidence-based instruction. Motivated by the widespread impact of ineffective teaching practices, he created a freely accessible spelling and decoding curriculum grounded in the latest research.
As a school, we have been teaching this curriculum in all year levels since January.
Throughout the day, Shane guided us through the key components of the PhOrMeS Word Reading & Spelling Curriculum and explained how the program aligns with both the Science of Reading and the Science of Learning.
He also shared how students progress through the curriculum from Foundation to Year 6.
Staff participated enthusiastically as we decoded, blended, and recorded words on our mini-whiteboards.
We progressed to morphology where we broke words like 'reformed' into morphemes re/form/ed
- 're' is a prefix, it means 'again'.
- 'form' means structure/shape
- 'ed' is a suffix that changes a verb into past tense.
Therefore, 'reformed' means that something has changed its shape or structure.
Thanks to this enriching professional learning, SKiPPS staff have further refined their teaching approaches and were able to deliver polished and effective lessons to students straight away.
PhOrMeS is developed with review and retrieval built in. Every new code, word, skill that the students are exposed to is built into the lessons so that it is reviewed daily, weekly, monthly and then termly allowing students to move the learning from their working memory (which is limited) into their long term memory (unlimited). Forcing our brains to retrieve previously learned knowledge from our long term memory increases the chances of it being permanently in our long term memory.
Already at SKiPPS, after just one term, we are seeing the positive impacts of PhOrMeS. The students are enthusiastically sharing their knowledge of codes and the various sounds that are represented by them and the older students are building greater confidence with spelling awareness around short and long vowels, silent final 'e' and their understanding of morphemes.
Jac Morphy
Assistant Principal - Curriculum and Instruction