Literacy

 

Riddells Creek Primary School literacy teaching promotes skill development in reading and viewing, writing, speaking, and listening in a supportive and stimulating environment. Planning is based on the Victorian Curriculum and is evidence-based, supported by best practices around literacy acquisition.

 

The school has been embarking on the Science of Reading journey and teachers have an understanding of effective teaching of Literacy including the Reading Rope (Scarborough, H. S.), the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer) and the six elements of effective reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, oral language, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension).

 

In 2020, we also introduced the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum. This is explicitly taught for the first 10 minutes of each day F-2. We have invested in new sets of decodable readers and we are moving towards all of our children using decodable readers to practise the sound-spelling relationships and their decoding skills. Students in grades 3-6 are taught using strategies that enable them to decode, understand, interpret, critically analyse, reflect on and enjoy written and visual texts.

Students participate in whole-class, small group and individual writing conferences with their teachers, who scaffold learning and explicitly teach each of the 6+1 Traits of Writing.

The 6+1 Traits of Writing were developed by Ruth Culham and are research based.  By using the 6+1 Traits, it provides students with opportunities to explore the following elements of quality writing: Voice, Ideas, Conventions, Organisation, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency and Presentation.