English 2025

Dear Families,

As communicated via an Operoo sent this week, we have some exciting developments ahead in the teaching of English at St Louis.

In 2025, our Prep, Year 1 and Year 2 students will be introduced to a program called Little Learners Love Literacy. Little Learners is an explicit and sequential literacy approach for teaching children to read, write and spell with confidence. 

Evidence-based literacy research stresses the importance of explicit and sequential literacy teaching from the beginning, and we will be ensuring our students receive this through the implementation of Little Learners.

Little Learners Love Literacy is a systematic and engaging program with focused explicit lessons, games, crafts, music, puppets, drawing and much more.

The program focuses on the key elements of reading success :

Phonemic awareness and phonics for spelling and reading

Handwriting

Reading fluency

Vocabulary and comprehension.

Families in Prep - Year 2 are asked to purchase a Little Learners Reading Journal for their child through the Uniform Shop, available online from January or in person from January 28. Our teachers have undertaken Professional Learning in Little Learners and we are excited about what lies ahead.

Our students in Years 3-6 will also be learning through the implementation of effective, evidence based teaching practices, including through novel studies at each level. 

We aim to ensure that every child has access to high-quality instruction and we will be creating and using resources that ensure learning is consistent and meets the needs of our students. This will include using units from OCHRE Education.

During the first half of the year, students will be reading the following novels -

Year 3 - Matilda by Roald Dahl

Year 4 - Uncle Xbox by Jared Thomas

Year 5 - War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

Year 6 - A Ghost in my Suitcase by Gabriella Wang

Each child will require a copy of their class novel and these will be on sale through the Uniform Shop, available online from January or in person from January 28. If you'd like to grab a copy to add to your child's Christmas gift, feel free to see Lisa Goodes in the Uniform Shop before school concludes. 

More information will be shared with families in Term 1 and in the meantime if you have any questions please contact me via email (ahealy@stlouisaspendale.com).

Best wishes,

Angela Healy

English Leader