LITERACY /

LEARNING & TEACHING 

Literacy Learning at Holy Name

Dear Parents/Carers and Community,

My name is Helen Butler, and I am joining Holy Name in the role of Literacy Leader in Term 1, 2024.  I am excited to join your learning community and look forward to being in classrooms with the teachers and learners. 

 At Holy Name, we believe that parents play an important part in their children’s learning and development during the school years and beyond.  This is why we value a supportive community and school learning partnership.

Our Home Learning Policy aims to reflect the importance of families learning together with the school to provide meaningful support for learning and growing the learner dispositions of the future in all students.

In saying that, our home reading program is starting across the school in the next week with students taking home a variety of texts to read independently, and with you. There is a mixture of texts included in their book bags including teacher-guided selections and their self-selected ‘Just Right’ texts.

Research related to reading at home shows that it has a positive impact on progress and achievement if done every night by students for a minimum of 10mins. The purpose of reading at home is for students to read texts that they are familiar with, they can read more than once and do not require a high degree of word problem solving – rather it is for enjoyment, practise of reading strategies, developing fluency and to improve comprehension.

Teachers use instructional level texts at school so they can readily support and explicitly teach students during the reading workshop. Therefore, you may notice some books taken home may seem easy, but this supports reducing anxiety related to having to decode

every word. This allows students to practice reading strategies without struggling with the text. The most important of these strategies being comprehension – understanding what they are reading.

Many thanks for your support with reading at home this year.  Some helpful prompts to support conversations with your child/children include:

* What happened in the story?  Who were the main characters?

* Where could we go to find some more information about that?

* What did you learn?

* Why do you think the character did that?

* Why do you think the author chose that title?

* How did the illustrations, captions or diagrams help with your understanding?

Regards,

Helen Butler

Our Home Learning Policy, is on our school's website;

 https://hnpe.catholic.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2021-HOME-LEARNING-POLICY.pdf