From our Literacy Specialist
Mrs Seyer’s Spotlight on Literacy
At RNPS we are extremely proud of the changes our school has made to our literacy teaching over the past few years. If you have had another child come through the school in the past, you may have noticed that the way your child talks about (and goes about) reading to you at home, and the way they attack new words has changed. Many parents have discussed this with me when I catch them for a chat in the schoolyard.
Our current school-wide approach to teaching reading emphasises teaching our students the 44 sounds included in our English language, then mapping these sounds to the symbols that can represent each of the sounds. You may have heard the term ‘Phonics’ being used quite a bit in the media in recent times. Through systematic phonics instruction, we teach our beginning readers to understand the letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns linked to each sound (phoneme). Then we help them learn how to apply this knowledge in their reading. They learn to truly ‘decode’ our written language, rather than guessing at what the words might say!
Below is a link to a page outlining the 44 sounds (phonemes) in our spoken language. I wonder if you notice them more once you know how many there are. This resource doesn’t include all the symbol combinations to make them (there‘s well over 200!) but it gives us a starting point in understanding why it takes systematic teaching, time and practice to become a proficient reader and speller.