Literacy

Literacy News

Hi Everyone welcome back to an exciting Term 3 in literacy learning at SFX. On Monday the 15th of July all staff were involved with professional development in Literacy in Writing, Spelling and Reading.  

In Term 2 , two teachers from the senior school Mrs Fiona George and Mrs Sarah Karakalykes attended a whole day  professional development on a new writing program called ‘Seven Steps to writing success’ .

Fiona and Sarah presented all of the staff a dynamic, informative presentation about the Seven Steps program and all teachers will be implementing some of the strategies and ideas into their classrooms this year.  

Thanks to funds provided by the Parents and Friends committee, we have been able to purchase all online and teaching manual resources for ‘Seven Steps’ to implement in to all classrooms this year. 

We are all very excited to implement some new and exciting strategies into our ‘writing’ teaching  and look forward to reading lots of exhilarating writing from our children this year.

If you would like to know more about ‘Seven Steps to Writing Success’ Please click on this link: https://www.sevenstepswriting.com/what-are-the-seven-steps/

The second part of our literacy professional development was facilitated by myself focussing on our new approach to literacy at St Francis this year.

The presentation was an opportunity to present current scientific evidence for effective teaching of reading/writing/spelling to all staff.    

Two years ago I completed MSL ( Multisensory Language ) training with the Australian Dyslexia Foundation and through this course it became evident that

a focus on a systematic , synthetic phonics approach to reading, writing and spelling was best practise for all students. 

In our two Prep classrooms this year we have implemented this approach through a wonderful resource called ; Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL) . The children are working through a systematic approach to learning the alphabetic code  using the vibrant decodable reading series featuring the adventures of Tim and Pim . Mrs Angela Scarcella and Mrs Jeanine Sutherland are thrilled with the results they are seeing from their little learners in all areas of literacy. 

If you would like to read more about our approach including LLLL please find the following links for more information :

https://littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au/

https://www.fivefromfive.org.au/five-keys-to-reading/

In the coming weeks two teachers Miss Erin Pretto ( Year 4EP), Mrs Belinda Jackson ( 2JE) and myself will be attending new professional development in a Spelling resource called SMART spelling. I look forward to reporting information about this new resource this term .

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our school community for helping us purchase new decodable readers for our students this term. The children are loving their new readers and we are very grateful for the help from the parents and friends committee for their support in providing these for us in literacy learning.