Learning Partnership
This Week's Learning Bulletin: Reading
Our Approach to Teaching Reading
At Armadale Primary School, we are proud of our evidence-informed approach to reading, grounded in the Science of Reading. Our pedagogy reflects a comprehensive and explicit approach, with the goal of developing confident, skilled, and joyful readers.
We actively promote a comprehensive reading model, which includes:
- Reading by your child – when your child practises applying decoding and comprehension skills independently.
- Reading with your child – shared reading experiences that build fluency and understanding.
- Reading to your child – where listening to fluent, expressive reading helps build vocabulary, comprehension, and a love of literature.
This approach is supported through our Reading at Home program, which encourages daily reading practice. Each student receives an Armadale Primary School Reading Journal to track their reading, reflect on their learning, and celebrate their progress.
What Do We Teach in Reading?
Our classroom reading program is built around three essential pillars:
1. Decoding: Phonics and phonological awareness (including segmenting and blending sounds) are key to helping students tackle unfamiliar words. We use the Letters and Sounds program to explicitly teach and reinforce these skills in a structured, cumulative way.
2. Comprehension: Making meaning is at the heart of reading. Our students learn and practise a range of comprehension strategies such as:
- Activating prior knowledge
- Predicting and inferring
- Asking questions before, during and after reading
- Summarising and synthesising
- Visualising what they read
3. Fluency: Reading fluency is essential for comprehension. Our instructional model – whole, small/ individual, whole – ensures every child reads aloud with a teacher each week. During this time, teachers monitor:
- Oral reading fluency
- Phonics knowledge
- Application of comprehension strategies
This consistent and targeted approach supports each student’s reading development in a personalised way.
The Results Speak for Themselves
We are thrilled to share that this research-aligned, structured reading approach has contributed to outstanding results in the 2025 NAPLAN assessments.
The graph below indicates where we sit with similar schools, which are marked in blue. We are in orange and we should be proud of our achievement. 45% of our Year 5 students achieved 'EXCEEDING' in 2025 for Reading.
These 2 graphs show the breakdown of results for our Year 3 and Year 5 students. Please note that we have included all categories - Exceeding; Strong; Developing; Needs Assistance and Exempt. The 'Similar School Comparison' graph does not factor in data for students who were exempt.
Our students’ growth and achievement reflect the strength of our program and the shared commitment between school and home.
Thank you for being our partners in nurturing a love of reading!
Connie Apostolos
Assistant Principal