Through the English curriculum, our focus is to develop students’ speaking, listening, reading, writing and thinking skills.
As Literacy forms an essential foundation for all learning, we place a strong focus in the early years on explicit, systematic instruction in core literacy skills. These include word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting, sentence-level writing, and academic talk. As students' progress through the year levels, they apply, develop and build on these essential skills in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Students engage in approximately 10 hours of English instruction per week. Instruction focuses on developing essential literacy skills -
- knowledge of reading and writing
- knowledge for reading and writing, and
- building a love of learning, language, and literature.
During lessons, students are encouraged to participate many times in each lesson to ensure that they are engaged with the learning and are understanding all new learning. Students are taught first and then asked questions to check for their understanding.
We follow a structured literacy approach that focuses on phonemic awareness, synthetic phonics, fluency, vocabulary and reading challenging texts about our content focus.
We have Sounds-Write as our synthetic phonics program from Foundation to Grade 2. Students learn sentence structure as well as how to write extended texts. Students are active learners who read and write about what they learn and then use their knowledge to investigate, experiment, create or influence.
To find out more about the Sounds-Write Program please follow this link -
The components to reading are as follows:
- Phonological Awareness
- Phonics
- Vocabulary
- Fluency
- Comprehension
Our structured reading and writing approach includes:
- Explicit teaching of phonological awareness and phonics
- Guided practice to improve fluency
- Vocabulary development
- Explicit teaching of comprehension strategies and questioning techniques