All students at WLC have a Personalised Learning Plan, which prescribes their individual academic goals for the year. These plans are collaboratively designed by teachers and families during Term 1 and regularly updated throughout the year.
All students also have the opportunity to participate in our literacy intervention (“Sounds Write”) and speech pathology programs if these are areas of need for them.
Science of Reading
The Science of Reading is the research our curriculum is based on. This research tells us how to help people become skilled readers. Our view on reading is:
Reading is not a skill that children will naturally or automatically develop
Reading has to be taught.
The way to create a reader is by helping students learn how letters represent the sounds we speak
Some children learn to read more easily than others, and some children struggle with the process.
Two essential skill areas that have to come together are
They are understanding spoken language and
Decode print
It is important for students to know and use lots of words. Reading starts with being able to understand the meaning of words.
Listening and talking are important foundations for reading.
The sounds in the words we speak are called phonemes. Being able to blend sounds into whole words and being able to take spoken words and say the separate sounds are essential building blocks of reading.
People who can do this are more likely to be good readers and spellers.
The reason working with phonemes is important is because it is the sounds that get represented by letters. To be able to read, students have to know the sounds that go with the letters. This is called decoding. Or what we might call cracking the code.
Students need to know the way letters represent speech. They have to be able to go from sounds to letters to be able to spell and from letters to sounds to be able to read.
Once a student can read the word on the page, they can connect it to the meaning of the word.
This connection between decoding the word and understanding what the word means leads to reading comprehension.
How we will teach the code is through Sounds-Write.
This program is a structured synthetic phonics programme that is:
Multisensory
Focuses on ‘cracking the code’
Comprehensive in code, skills and concept knowledge
We will be:
Reading to our class.
Building knowledge on a wide variety of topics is critically important to reading comprehension.
We will be working with your child one-on-one to focus on the skills they need to learn.
We will be doing assessments that tell us exactly what your child needs to learn next.
We will be giving your child books that let him or her practice the new sound-spelling patterns they are learning. These books are called decodable text. They only contain words with patterns that the students have been taught.