Learning & Teaching

Leader: Stephanie Hayes

Over the past 18 months the staff at St Patrick’s Primary School have been undertaking Professional Development around Reading and Phonics development. As a result of this learning, your child’s take-home readers and reading at home will look different. Last year we spent time enhancing our phonics teaching instruction, to assist students to learn to read. We are up to the next phase of our phonics journey so we thought it was important to communicate what home reading will look like within our school for the 2023 school year. At the moment we are in the process of purchasing decodable phonics take home readers. These readers will correlate to the phonics lessons that your child has been learning in class. We are still in the purchasing stage therefore our focus at the moment is reading for enjoyment. There are many students across the school that will not have decodable phonics readers sent home as they will not align with their individual reading skills and learning goals. 

 

Students will have a bookmark with three different indicators on it: 

  • I do 
  • We do 
  • You do 

This language is the same through our phonics lessons as when learning new and different skills, sometimes we need to be shown how to do it, sometimes we need to practice together and other times we are confident and able to do it by ourselves. Teachers will indicate in your child’s reading diary what kind of text it is and students will have this text for the week. 

The texts that your child will bring home will either be books that they have chosen and borrowed from the school Library or they will be books that have been selected from the ‘interest tub’ in their classroom. The ‘interest tub’ contains all the leveled books that were take-home readers in the past and are now being used to explore different themes such as adventure, friendship, health etc. The purpose of the ‘interest tub’ is to either read for enjoyment or to deepen our understanding on a particular topic that might be helpful in other lessons e.g. reading a text about different animals might help in Inquiry.  

Reading nights will still be tallied and celebrated at assemblies. Reading Awards will be awarded for the following nights reading: 

  • 25 nights 
  • 50 nights 
  • 75 nights 
  • 100 nights 
  • 150 nights 
  • 200 nights  

We understand that this is very different to the levelled system that some of us are used to and we will be providing regular updates as the home reading system moves towards a decodable phonics approach.