Literacy in Focus

Staff Professional Learning

At the end of Term 1, Mrs Johnstone led teaching staff through a review of our Literacy practices, including the content and delivery of The Literacy Block and Writing Instruction.

It is our aim that our Literacy Blocks are structured to provide:

- balanced, engaging, and targeted instruction

- support for students in developing reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills

- integration of skills as much as possible

Mrs Johnstone used The Writing Revolution, by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, to explore Writing instruction. The Writing Revolution is based on The 6 Principles of the Hochman Method including:

-the need for explicit instruction, beginning in the early grades

-sentences are the building blocks of all writing

-writing should be embedded in the content of the whole curriculum

-curriculum content drives the rigor of writing activities

-grammar is best taught in the context of student writing

-planning and revising are the most important writing phases

Intervention Programs

Did you know that at Sacred Heart, we offer a range of Literacy intervention programs that complement our core teaching practices?

These include:

Language Lift - explicitly teaches oral language skills to small groups of students (multilit.com)

MiniLit Sage - targets word recognition or decoding skills, to develop the second key strand of literacy development, language comprehension (multilit.com)

Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons -  a step-by-step program that introduces children to the reading process. Designed to work on a one-on-one basis with students in need of structured assistance (dsf.net.au)

Switch It - focuses on letter-sound knowledge, phonemic segmentation, phonemic manipulation, early decoding and spelling skills (readingsimplified.com)

SoundCheck - an early phonological awareness program designed to develop listening, rhyming, and sound manipulation skills that are essential for learning to read and spell.