Newport Lakes Primary School

Learning Focus

Literacy at NLPS - Reading

We have been continuously honing our teaching of Literacy at NLPS for the past few years and we are committed to following researched based practices, based on scientific evidence, when it comes to teaching the essential skills of reading, writing and spelling.  In this article, I will explain some of the ways we go about teaching these skills, and the underlying science and evidence behind this.

 

Here are some of the ways in which we ensure that we are following best practice in teaching the early years of Literacy at NLPS:

  • Following a systematic scope and sequence for the teaching of Grapheme (letter) Phoneme (sound) Correspondences (GPCs)
  • Use of decodable texts for the first semester of Foundation and use of decodable texts as needed on an individual basis thereafter. Decodable texts are wonderful texts that follow an explicit sequence, where new GPCs are gradually introduced, making the texts suitable for reading as the child’s knowledge of GPCs grows. For some students, if we expose them to spelling patterns they don’t yet know as they practise their reading skills, they may learn to not trust the decoding process and may resort to undesirable reading strategies such as guessing at words, which will not serve them well as they continue to develop as readers. Guessing at words is the habit of poor readers, and we want to ensure that we produce amazing readers at NLPS!
  • Introduction of a literacy block in Foundation and Year 1, where phonemic awareness, phonics, vocab, comprehension, handwriting, grammar, writing genres and more are taught together, so students understand that reading and writing are linked and that they skills they learn in one, help them in the other.
  • Following direct instruction approaches, such as Heggerty and Sounds-Write, which include research based, best practice methods such as multiple exposures, multi-sensory activities and daily reviews for retrieval practice, which ensure that students are ‘doing’ and being engaged at all times, and which ensure that information is successfully making it way to children’s long term memory. 

Over the past few decades, huge amounts of research have been conducted into how children learn to read and write and massive developments in cognitive science have given us really clear ideas about how the brain works when faced with learning to read and write and remembering new learning. All this has given educators the knowledge of how to teach children these skills and at Newport Lakes we are committed to ensuring our staff understand and follow these evidence based approaches to make sure that all our children can have success in reading and writing. 

 

It cannot be stated enough, just how important it is that students get every opportunity to become proficient readers and writers. In the world we live in now, students need to be literate to ensure they have equal access to jobs in the future. In today’s society, unlike in the past, there are very few jobs or careers available for people who cannot read.

 

What makes a successful reader?

Gough and Tunmer’s Simple View of Reading (image below) is widely accepted to be a clear formula that describes the components needed to be a successful reader – word recognition, which means the ability to decode the words  on the page, and language comprehension, which means the ability to derive meaning from language. To be a good reader, you cannot have one of these components without the other.

This can be broken down further: There are 5 pillars to reading – phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. All are equally important. At NLPS, we make sure that all of the 5 pillars of reading are addressed. 

 

In Foundation – Year 2, a large part of our teaching focus is on phonemic awareness and phonics, which help the word recognition phase of reading, while also continuing to address vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. From Year 3 onwards, there is less of a focus on these ‘building blocks’ and more of a focus on the language comprehension part of reading, as ‘learning to read’ changes to ‘reading to learn’. This article will focus on phonemic awareness and phonics, and the other skills will be addressed in a subsequent newsletter article.

 

Phonemic Awareness

This is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes (the sounds that make up English). In Foundation and Grade 1, we teach this and the underlying phonological awareness skills needed, through systematic and explicit strategies. We follow the Heggerty program which teaches children the skills of rhyming, isolating sounds in words, blending sounds to make words (to be able to read them), segmenting words into their individual sounds (so we can write them) and manipulating the sounds in words. 

 

Phonics

Phonics is the understanding of the relationships between the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) in a language. At NLPS, we follow a systematic, structured scope and sequence to ensure that students are confident in their knowledge of these Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) which allows them to ‘crack the code’ of reading and writing. We no longer advocate reading strategies such as looking at pictures in a text to help work out a word, or guessing based on context or first letter, as these strategies are not based on any scientific evidence and in fact actually hinder students’ reading ability (For example, if we teach children to look at the pictures to help them work out a word, what are they going to do when they start reading chapter books without pictures?).

 

We teach these GPCs, while also practising the essential skills of blending and segmenting. Blending is how you decode a word to read it, by saying the sounds and blending them together to read the word e.g.  /ch/ /i/ /n/  - chin. Segmenting is the process of hearing the individual sounds in a word so you can write them e.g. ‘stung’ /s/ /t/ /u/ /ng/. Our literacy support teachers have been trained in and use the Sounds-Write program with their students, which follows this evidence-based approach. Some of our Foundation, Grade 1 and Grade 2 teachers have recently also undergone Sounds-Write training, and we are delighted to announce that the rest of the Foundation team will complete their Sounds-Write training this Semester. 

 

Students learn that:

  • letters and sounds are connected 
  • a sound can be represented by 1,2, 3 or 4 letters (digraphs – ‘sh’ making the /sh/ sound as in ‘shop’, trigraphs - ‘igh’ making the /i/ sound as in ‘light’ and quadgraphs -  ‘eigh’ making the /a/ sound as in ‘eight’)
  • a spelling can represent more than one sound e.g. the spelling ‘ea’ can represent the long e sound as in ‘teach’, the short e sounds as in ‘weather’ and the long a sound as in ‘break’
  • a sound can be spelled in more than one way e.g. the /i/ sound can be spelled with i_e (bite), igh (fright), y (shy) etc. 

Going through the blending and segmenting process is essential to successful reading and writing. At the beginning stages of reading using this approach, reading can seem slow and laborious. But then a wonderful thing starts to happen, and you will notice your child begin to be able to read and write words by sight, without having to decode or segment. This is not because the child has rote learnt the word, but because they have ‘orthographically mapped’ the word – the cognitive process of storing words in long term memory. By reading or writing a word a few times, using the skills of matching the sound,  the spelling and the meaning,  children’s brains map the sounds, spelling and meaning of the word in long term memory for effortless and instant retrieval. For most children, this happens after just a few exposures to the word, but for some students, it can take longer. 

 

By having this focus in the early years, we are setting our students up for success in both reading and writing, ensuring that they have a strong foundation as they progress through school.

 

Carol Martins

Literacy Intervention Specialist

 

Numeracy at NLPS

We would love to invite all students to participate in our new Problem Solving Corner problems. Each fortnight we will publish new problems to be solved - both in the newsletter and in the window of The Maths Space. 

If you would like to, have a go at solving the problem. When you have done what you can, post your solution in the letter box outside The Maths Space. 

Don’t forget to include your name and your class on your work. After each round, one student will be awarded a special problem solving certificate at assembly. Have fun!

This Week’s Problems

 

My piggybank was empty but I have just put in 50c. 

I only put in 10c coins and/or 20c coins. 

What different combinations of coins might be inside?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Team Photograph

A photograph is to be taken of the school mixed five-a-side football squad, which includes three substitutes. The girls in the squad are Liz, Jenny, Sarah and Tracey. The boys are Alan, Matthew, Peter and Steve. The team line up in two rows of four. Read the clues below to work out who is standing where and what number they are wearing (which will be one of the numbers from 1 to 8).

 

Place the number in the top square of the answer grid and the name in the bottom square of each row. 

 

Clues:

  • Tracey is in the front row in front of Jenny
  • The average of the two numbers in the middle of the front row is Sarah’s number, a square. 
  • Peter is not sitting next to a girl
  • Steve is sitting between Liz and Jenny
  • Players with prime numbers, which includes Alan, are sitting in the front row.
  • There is only one boy on the end of a row. 
  • In both the front and the back rows the two places on the right (as you look at it) are filled by a boy and a girl.
  • Matthew and Steve have the highest and lowest numbers a boy could wear. 
  • Jenny’s number is three times as large as Tracey’s and twice as large as that of Peter, who is not sitting on the end of a row. 
  • Girls have even numbers.