Instructional Model

Explicit teaching – Explicit Direct Instruction is a teaching practice used in all grade levels for the teaching of English. Utilising an “I do, We do, You do” approach, teachers explicitly model and teach English concepts and skills, gradually releasing the responsibility to the students. Teachers offer support by conducting regular checks for understanding, small-groups, scaffolded tasks and giving students a variety of opportunities to respond. Students are actively engaged in the learning through reading aloud and pair-shares to foster participation. Teachers enable or extend the learning in each English lesson according to the individual needs of the students in their class.

Daily review – In each English lesson, teachers lead a brief routine to activate prior knowledge and strengthen long-term memory of previous concepts taught. This retrieval practices supports students to recall information and apply knowledge to new skills, before new information is taught.

Fluency pairs – Daily fluency pairs, reading a selected passage or text to focus on the development of reading fluently.

Reading Approach

Yarra Glen Primary School offers explicit, evidence-based teaching of word recognition and language comprehension skills. Students are systematically taught synthetic phonics and skills for decoding. In the Junior School, teachers use Little Learners Love Literacy and Australian Decodables for planning and teaching, along with decodable texts that link to student learning. From Prep-Grade 6, students are taught word reading (or decoding) in a sequential manner. Beginners are taught to read short, simple, phonetically regular words and progress to increasingly more difficult words across their primary schooling. Phonemic awareness is both taught separately and embedded in word reading and spelling activities.

Reading fluency is practised daily from Foundation to Grade 6. Students participate in daily fluency pairs, reading a selected passage or text to focus on reading fluency. This passage is used throughout the week, to promote reading fluency.

Reading and literacy sessions are planned to incorporate all strands of the Reading Rope. Scarborough’s Reading Rope provides a visual representation of the many strands woven into skilled reading. According to Scarborough, the word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. The language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader.

Writing Approach

Yarra Glen Primary School teaches the writing approach through the sequential development of grammar, sentence construction, embedded punctuation and text composition. Text genre is taught throughout each year level and is cumulatively built on as the students progress through the English writing curriculum. Students are taught to spell words with the same target graphemes, spelling rules, morphological concepts or etymological roots that they are learning to read.