The Teaching of Literacy

Overview

Streeton Primary School seeks to inspire students and develop an ongoing love of learning whilst developing quality skills in English. Our whole school approach is working towards students being taught consistently, systematically and explicitly through evidence-informed practices.

Implementation

Evidence-informed, structured literacy forms the basis of our Literacy Block. Our Literacy Block incorporates Reading and Writing with Oral Language Development. There is a strong focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, building knowledge, spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, text composition, morphology and etymology.

Throughout Literacy sessions, students develop their skills and knowledge through a variety of whole class, small group and individual instruction, designed to cater for differentiated learning needs whilst encouraging all students to become independent readers, writers and communicators.

Little Learners Love Literacy

Little Learners Love Literacy (a systematic synthetic phonics program) which has been implemented in the F–2 area is proven to create fluent, enthusiastic readers, confident speakers and willing writers. Our students are engaged daily with Milo Monkey and his friends in Foundation. Our students enthusiastically read the Pip and Tim Series of decodable texts as they move through these vital beginning stages of reading in F-2. 

PhOrMeS

It is so important for our children to learn to read and write, as they are a key link to success in school and a vital way for children to develop their full potential, both academically and personally. Streeton Primary has always spent extensive time and resources to help our students learn to read and write. We have always been proud to be at the forefront of Literacy learning, and kept up-to-date with initiatives.

To ensure we are on track with research-informed practices in Literacy at Streeton Primary School, we began working with Shane Pearson in 2023, a speech pathologist leading Literacy at Brandon Park Primary School. Shane Pearson has successfully implemented PhOrMeS, a curriculum he designed with the research-informed practice. 

In Junior School, the new PhOrMeS curriculum will complement the Little Learners Love Literacy’s Phonics program, which will be entering into its third year at Streeton Primary School. In the Upper School, our students will be exposed to new and exciting vocabulary, and word study through explicit instruction on morphology and etymology.

Writing

At Streeton Primary School, students participate in lessons focusing on grammar, sentence

construction with embedded punctuation, and work towards skill development of paragraphs and text

composition. They also work towards genre composition of narrative, information/explanation,

procedural and recount texts.

Knowledge and Language Vocabulary

At Streeton Primary School we provide a rich curriculum material for teaching reading comprehension within a knowledge-rich curriculum. Some of the materials accessed by our students include text novel studies (in the 3-6), and Core Knowledge Curriculum Units. Core Knowledge produces units that cover content such as, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and English Language Arts. These units also explicitly link to some of the writing instruction.

Assessment 

Teachers at Streeton Primary School closely monitor each child’s progress in Reading, Writing and Oral Language development, using a range of assessment tools. Assessment includes teacher observation and anecdotal notes, formal assessment, students completing assessment tasks using ICT and teachers moderating samples of work. These tasks are linked to benchmarks to provide data. All year levels use the DIBELS Reading Assessment Tool to establish each child’s literacy learning progress is tracked as they move through the school.

Home and School Partnership

A partnership between home and school is strongly encouraged and Home Reading is an essential part of our school’s reading program. Making Home Reading fun will help to develop a love of reading for your child. You can read to and with your child, as well as listening to them read.

Students are provided with books to read at home through our Take Home Reading system (in F-2), as well as through Library borrowing. 

Conclusion

At Streeton Primary School we take great pride in the development and implementation of our Literacy curriculum and its associated achievements. We are committed to supporting our staff with establishing best practice and ongoing professional learning.

Mathematics

Mathematics provides students with access to important mathematical ideas, knowledge and skills that they will draw on in their personal and work lives. The curriculum also provides students, as life-long learners, with the basis on which further study and research in mathematics and applications in many other fields are built.

Mathematical ideas have evolved across societies and cultures over thousands of years, and are constantly developing. Digital technologies are facilitating this expansion of ideas and provide new tools for mathematical exploration and invention. While the usefulness of mathematics for modelling and problem solving is well known, mathematics also has a fundamental role in both enabling and sustaining cultural, social, economic and technological advances and empowering individuals to become critical citizens.

Number, measurement and geometry, statistics and probability are common aspects of most people’s mathematical experience in everyday personal, study and work situations. Equally important are the essential roles that algebra, functions and relations, logic, mathematical structure and working mathematically play in people’s understanding of the natural and human worlds, and the interaction between them.

The Mathematics curriculum focuses on developing increasingly sophisticated and refined mathematical understanding, fluency, reasoning, modelling and problem-solving. These capabilities enable students to respond to familiar and unfamiliar situations by employing mathematics to make informed decisions and solve problems efficiently. ​

The curriculum ensures that the links between the various components of mathematics, as well as the relationship between mathematics and other disciplines, are made clear. Mathematics is composed of multiple but interrelated and interdependent concepts and structures which students apply beyond the mathematics classroom. For example, in Science, understanding sources of error and their impact on the confidence of conclusions is vital; in Geography, interpretation of data underpins the study of human populations and their physical environments; in History, students need to be able to imagine timelines and time frames to reconcile related events; and in English, deriving quantitative, logical and spatial information is an important aspect of making meaning of texts.

Click on the following link to view a PDF of the PowerPoint presentation regarding Maths at Streeton Primary.