At Sebastopol Primary School our students participate in a daily uninterrupted two hour literacy block based on the Victorian Curriculum that develops knowledge and skills enabling success in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening and Word Study.
The school’s Reading and Writing Instructional Models provide the framework for high quality, consistent practice across the school, based on current research and evidence based high impact teaching strategies. Clear learning intentions and success criteria are developed for all lessons, with explicit teaching provided at students’ point of need. Daily instruction is based on data and teacher judgment ensuring a differentiated program that challenges and supports all learners. To maximise learning growth, students have reading and writing goals they are continually working towards. Feedback and reflection are important elements of all lessons.
In reading, teachers explicitly teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, to enable students to read and comprehend texts of increasing difficulty, with accuracy and fluency and to foster a lifelong love of reading. Each classroom has a Classroom Library with fiction and non fiction texts of high interest that have been selected by students. In addition to Classroom Libraries, Sebastopol Primary School also has an onsite Library for student borrowing and regular access to the local Sebastopol Library which is within walking distance.
In writing, teachers use a range of mentor texts to support students to learn to plan, write, edit and publish a variety of text types to entertain, inform and persuade. Students develop their knowledge of spelling, grammar and punctuation through explicit teaching, and learn to create texts with confidence. Writer’s Notebooks enable students to generate and develop their own ideas and work through the writing process, drafting, revising and editing, before publishing and sharing their success as writers. Victorian Cursive handwriting script and keyboarding skills are explicitly taught P-6.
In Word Study, students in the early years are taught letters and sounds, how to manipulate sounds, identify graphs, digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs, identify basic high frequency words to automaticity, know the meaning of an increasing number of words (Tier 2) and understand the meaning and intent of texts.
Students at Sebastopol Primary School have access to a range of intervention programs:
We aim to provide highly engaging lessons and learning experiences where students are inspired to read and write by linking learning to real life situations.
We have high expectations that students will grow and achieve their full potential in all aspects of literacy learning.
