We value a balanced approach to teaching and learning in Literacy, where students are exposed to and explicitly taught reading strategies to decode texts, whilst maintaining a strong focus on comprehension. Students are taught the foundation skills of oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, whilst also engaging in opportunities for meaning making, as they develop their vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. We strive to ensure our students read for meaning and therefore have a hefty emphasis on developing and employing the comprehension strategies when reading.
Literacy Curriculum
Together with the teacher, each student creates Reading and Writing goals, which they work towards during the independent learning time. Students’ build a greater level of independence and autonomy for their learning. Goals are monitored by both the student and teacher, and new goals are set regularly to ensure they remain relevant. Through the Reading Workshop, students have endless opportunities to choose ‘Just Right’ books, to support their goals and reading abilities.
At NMPS, we utilise the Writer’s Workshop in partnership with the 6+1 Traits of Writing as a framework for curriculum planning in Writing. Students are taught to move through the stages in the writing process (idea development, drafting, revising, editing, publishing), whilst utilising rich mentor texts to support the development of their ideas, text organisation, author voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.
Speaking and Listening is incorporated into our teaching and learning programs, to honour their authenticity. Students are provided with various opportunities to share and present their work from various key-learning areas and are expected to demonstrate active and respectful listening to their peers and teachers, alike.
Responsive Teaching and Planning in Literacy
Literacy planning occurs in year level teams with a focus on utilising an improvement cycle to develop planning which directly reflects student data. Each planning block follows a process where teachers analyse data to diagnose student needs and set learning goals linked to these areas. Planning is responsive to student data and this is monitored over the three-week planning cycle. Teams are supported by the Literacy Coach during these sessions.