New Entrants
Children starting school should find it an enjoyable experience. Any work they bring home could be talked about and celebrated - for the effort they put in and the result achieved.
We like you to be involved in our programme, and you are invited to join various activities. At various times requests will be made for parents/grandparents or extended whanau to come in and support the literacy programme in various ways.
Learning to read when they start at Flemington is based around Structured Literacy. Structured Literacy explicitly teaches systematic word identification/decoding strategies. This approach will benefit all students and is vital for a number of children. It lays the foundation on which children will be able to build on and experience success across the literacy field.
The children will be learning a prescribed group of sounds/concepts which will be supported by letter sounds cards etc and then decodables as they progress. Children will move through the sequence of sounds/concepts at their own rate and support at home with their progression will be greatly beneficial.
Reading learning material going home in the initial time at school will consist of letter sound cards. This initial foundation learning of the vowel sounds and consonant sounds will progress to words and after a number of weeks they will bring home Decodable books which are designed to support the structured literacy sequence of learning to read. They will take home other reading books from the library or in class but they are not their instructional reading books - they are for enjoyment and having them read to them. The teachers will outline this in more detail once they start school.
A Reading Bag is part of their stationery and will be used as a conduit between school and home:
When reading to children at home as they are learning to read:
- Make sure it is an enjoyable experience.
- Talk about what a book is and how it works.
- Look through the book to explore it.
- Help your child with the sounds of the letter and how they make up the whole word if needed.
- They may bring home sound or word cards or decodable books.
- Repetition is a very powerful learning process so these reading resources may be read multiple times keeping in mind the level of interest.
Learning To Read
- Structured Literacy will be the fundamental approach to supporting children in learning to read especially in Years 1-3, using the
- New entrants will be using decodables books until they are at a level that they can be introduced to the readers at around Level 7. Decodables may still be used in conjunction with levelled readers until such time they are no longer needed.
- Structured Literacy is a crucial part of the ‘learning to read’ stage but children will still be exposed and immersed in rich literacy opportunities that provide many experiences and opportunities to engage with the written word and be successful.
- Teachers implement explicit acts of teaching
Support and Intervention
- Structured Literacy will be the basis for ongoing support and intervention for those children that need more time to build their reading capability and skills.
- Support and Intervention will be available across all year levels to support the needs of tamariki.
- Learning assistants will be used to support the delivery of the intervention and support programmes and strategies used.
- Support agencies and personnel will be accessed as needed to support the students, teachers, whanau with support of the SENCO.
Reading To Learn and Understand
- Continued support to reach automaticity of the key aspects of word recognition
- Further development of the key aspects that support and grow language comprehension through specific teaching and choice of language experiences.
- Structured Literacy is a key tool used to support ongoing knowledge and understanding of the increasingly broader aspects of the 40 Concepts.
- Spelling and morphology are linked to Structured Literacy with connections made across the curriculum.
- Teachers implement deliberate acts of teaching