Assistant Principal Report
Dear Parents and Carers,
A key aspect of the Victorian Curriculum English domain is the explicit teaching of phonics. Phonics is one of the essential elements of learning to read, alongside phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
Phonics involves the recognition of sounds (phonemes) and the symbol/letter representation of these sounds (graphemes). For students to become fluent readers, they must be taught all the common ways of representing English speech sounds (phonemes).
Sounds Write- Supporting your child’s phonics and phonological awareness skills
Sounds Write is a systematic, linguistic phonics program that is being taught across Grade Prep, Grade 1 and Grade 2 at our school.
The program focuses on teaching sounds (phonemes) and spellings (graphemes), alongside the phonological awareness skills of segmenting words into sounds, blending sounds into words and manipulating the sounds in words to make new ones. The program focuses on both reading words and spelling and is supported by the use of decodable readers.
The Sounds Write team offer some online professional learning and resources for parents. The professional learning focuses on the program that is being taught in Grade Prep, into Grade 1. If you have pre-school/kinder children, this online learning is a great resource for you- and it’s free!
Help your child to read and write- Courses
Online Course 1:
This first course includes all the know-how and resources to get your child started, by introducing all the one-to-one spellings in the context of word reading, word building and sound-swap with simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words, as well as the skills they need to succeed.
You can access the course here:
https://www.udemy.com/course/help-your-child-to-read-and-write
Online Course 2
This second course introduces words of a more complex structure (CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC), as well as some diagraphs (two letters, one sound) such as ss, ll, sh, ck and others.
You can access the course here:
https://www.udemy.com/course/help-your-child-to-read-and-write-part-2/learn/
Initial Code app
If you have an iPad you can download the app that supports the program. It is called Initial Code, by Sounds-Write Ltd. There is a free version of the app with some sample lessons, and a full version for sale too. The app offers a variety of activities to develop the skills of segmenting and blending, word reading and writing and some sentence reading and writing. The app has been designed to introduce the sound-spelling correspondences in the Initial Code of the Sounds-Write program. The activities in the app mirror the activities completed in the classroom.
Sarah Mills
Assistant Principal
Acting Assistant Principal
Simon Radford