Literacy Programs

High Quality, Explicit and Personalised

At Central Yorke School our Primary Literacy and reading programs are intentional, explicit and follow best practice guidelines. As a site we pride ourselves on the high quality delivery of our InitaLit program.

InitiaLit

InitiaLit is an evidence based whole class literacy program which provides all children with the essential core knowledge and strong foundations to become successful readers and writers. IntiaLit is a three year program, covering the first three years of school from Foundation to Year 2. By providing this explicit program from the outset we are finding that our students Phonics results are high and that fewer children are requiring intensive intervention. Regular progress monitoring using curriculum based assessments also provides our teachers with a clear picture of where each individual student is at and allows us to responsively address their learning needs.

Literacy Support and Extension Programs

Alongside our InitaLit program we are committed to providing students with a quality literacy support and extension program. At the start of each year every student from R-6 is put through a simple 5 minute screener to identify missing links and intervention needs. Those students identified as requiring further support are put into our MultiLit program. This provides our students with small group tuition with an SSO to build the key components necessary to become skilled readers: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Many of our students who have moved through this intervention program have seen increased confidence and results in their learning.

Heggerty Program

Our students from R-6 are also tested against a Heggerty screener to identify individual learner need in improving phonemic awareness. Our Heggerty program R-3 is another whole class Phonemic Awareness curriculum which provides students with a 10 minute daily routine of explicit instruction focused on the eight phonemic awareness skills, along with two additional activities to develop letter and sound recognition and language awareness. We also use the “Bridge the gap” program for our Years 4-6 students so that we can target their missed skills and implement intervention to address the gaps in student learning which may be preventing them from becoming skilled readers. This program is multisensory and compliments our work in InitaLit.

Data Collection

Our teachers are also committed to a rigorous process of data collection to constantly monitor and respond to student progress and needs. Every teacher in our Primary is aware of the required reading skills and behaviours to build skilled readers and we map this out for every individual student against the Literacy Progressions. This alongside other little data sets this helps to inform us in planning student reading goals and next steps for learning. Every student in our Primary is given a reading goal to promote student autonomy of learning and drive individual motivation to improve. This process provides students with a clear and intentional next step to their reading development while also building the appropriate meta-language of reading.

Reading Corners

Every class in our Primary has a dedicated reading corner which outlines every student’s individual reading goal and the reciprocal reading strategies which can support them in their comprehension of text. We also have a strong focus on using classroom word walls to provide students with a permanent model of high frequency words to continually reference subject specific language and vocabulary.