LITERACY

River Valley Primary School

Literacy

River Valley Primary School

River Valley Primary School has a whole school approach to teaching English, through the embedding of various evidence-based programs into literacy instruction.

Teaching and Learning also takes into account the requirements of the WA Curriculum. Students work independently and cooperatively to build their knowledge and skills in listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing.

Reading strategies and comprehension are explicitly taught during Shared Reading and Guided Reading lessons, providing students the opportunity to receive targeted instruction at their level. The high quality synthetic phonics program Letters and Sounds is taught from Kindergarten to Year 2.

In Year 3-6 we move onto Word Origins, which is an evidence-informed program from dyslexia SPELD Foundation designed to provide the next step in spelling, reading and vocabulary instruction for students in middle to upper primary school and beyond. Designed to follow any high-quality structured phonics program, Word Origins targets student knowledge of the morphological regularities of English, and the etymology, or language of origin, of our vocabulary, and the impact these elements have on spelling, reading, and word knowledge.

Education Assistants facilitate Tier 2 intervention programs using the Letters and Sounds program to provide additional literacy instruction to those students requiring extra support.

Home Reading is valued and promoted across the school, with students borrowing reading books and library books each week. Students are encouraged to read at home each night in order to develop reading fluency. Home Readers are not intended to be challenging. Instead, the purpose is to use these texts to consolidate classroom learning and apply skills independently to unfamiliar texts.

The Letters and Sounds program effectively targets the development of oral language, reading, spelling and written expression in the early years in addition to providing an excellent structure for remediation in upper primary and beyond.

It sets out a detailed and systematic program for teaching and phonic skills for children starting in early years, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age 7.

It aligns with the achievement standards outlined in the Australian Curriculum (English) and has been shown to significantly improve whole-school literacy outcomes.

DOWNLOAD RVPS LETTERS & SOUNDS

Heggerty Phonological Awareness

Developed in 2003 by Dr Michael Heggerty, the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is a systematic 35 week program of daily lesson plans that provide a high level of explicit modelling and student engagement.

This program focuses on the 8 phonemic aware skills, along with two additional skills of letter and sound recognition and language awareness:

Rhyming

Onset fluency

Blending

Isolating final and medial phonemes (sounds),

Segmenting

Adding phonemes

Deleting phoneme and

Substituting phoneme

Phonological awareness allows children to recognize and work with the sounds of language. Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. It refers to the bigger “chunks” or “parts” of language. When we ask students to rhyme, blend small words to make a compound word, break words apart into syllables or onset-rime, we are working at the phonological awareness level.

Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading success. It is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development and is a foundation for reading.

Phonemic awareness if the understanding that spoken words are made of individual sounds called phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of a sound we hear in a word. Phonemic awareness falls underneath the umbrella of phonological awareness. Rather than working with larger units of spoken language, we ask students to listen for the individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words.

All lessons are designed for a classroom setting, only take 10-12 minutes, and are very easy to implement. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is also designed to work alongside existing structured synthetic phonics programs and is a great way to build up the phonological skills of our early readers.

Talk for Writing

At River Valley Primary School, all of our teachers use an internationally proven teaching strategy (Talk for Writing) to improve children’s writing. This highly engaging strategy links oral language, actions, movement and innovation. The results and improvements in children’s writing is amazing.