Literacy

At Mount Helena Primary School, we have a high focus on literacy. Literacy is the ability to read, view, write, design, speak and listen in a way that allows you to communicate effectively.

In order to assist our students to apply these communication skills to effectively connect, interpret and understand the world we live in, we use multiple programs to enhance our teaching program.

Literacy Block: Each classroom utilises the Literacy Block model to support teaching with explicit teachings of phonics/spelling, modelled reading and writing and guided reading and writing activities to consolidate learning and practice new skills.

Talk for Writing - Kindy to Year 6

Spelling Mastery - Years 3-6

Spelling Mastery was developed in line with best practice instruction, that teaches students dependable spelling skills by blending three approaches: the phonemic approach, the whole word approach and the morphemic approach. 

Spelling Mastery interweaves these three approaches according to students' skill development and provides straightforward lessons to help you efficiently and effectively teach the spelling skills students need to become proficient readers and writers. It will assist students in all areas of learning.

This Direct Instruction program provides instruction in small, carefully scaffolded steps to help students master each concept before a new one is presented. Frequent opportunities for review help students reinforce and retain each concept they master. Spelling Mastery focuses on how words are constructed so they can apply that knowledge of word construction to unknown words.

Letters and Sounds - Kindy to Year 2

This program is used at Mount Helena Primary School from Kindergarten to Year 2 and is used as an intervention program for students in Years 3-6. The program aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by the age of seven. There are six overlapping phases:

Phase 1: Activities are divided into seven aspects including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and oral blending and segmenting.

Phase 2: Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and the one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

Phase 3: The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th.  On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the ‘simple code’, ie, one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.

Phase 4: No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants.

Phase 5: Now we move on to the ‘complex code’. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Phase 6: Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc…

Here are some quick activities you can do at home with your child to help them to develop their skills in literacy:

Kindergarten to Year 2

• Keep blank paper and pencils handy at home for writing activities
• Read with and to your child every day
• Have your child collect and sort the mail – who are the letters for and who are they from?
• Create a collage using junk mail, old magazines, or your child’s drawings with a particular focus – this could include pictures of things beginning with /s/ or all pictures showing a particular colour…

Years 3-6

• Read some of the same books as your child and talk about the characters, storylines and themes
• Read the newspaper with your child each morning – choosing an article to discuss and ask questions such as ‘what is the report telling you?’ and ‘what does this word mean?’.
• Talk about movies you have seen; discuss why a filmmaker may have created a movie in a certain way, the purpose of the film, who the film was made for (audience)…