Literacy

At Birchville school our aim is to develop independent, critical thinking consumers and producers of literacy.  We believe that by giving our students a strong foundation we are setting them up for success in achieving this goal.  We have a great school library which is well used by our school and community.

We start with a Ready for Learning program in Greenstone developing the skills needed to learn at primary school and life!  The skills we focus on are hearing, moving, print, seeing and speaking.  

In Emerald and Moonstone, our students move into structured literacy where they learn encoding (handwriting, dictation, writing) and decoding (reading, spelling, phonics).  This is a very structured and systematic approach to literacy learning as the name would suggest and this is our first year using this approach.  

In Moonstone and Sapphire, our students start to become more critical consumers of what they are reading and writing.  In reading, students start to look at the tools authors use to infer, meaning while developing vocabulary keeping all that great information stored to help with their writing. Students start to write with a more specific audience in mind and using different genre, media and ict.  

Teachers use literacy assessments to guide them with their next teaching steps and use student interest as much as possible to keep our learning fresh and interesting.  In the senior school particularly you will see a cross over into most areas of learning especially inquiry learning.