Working in conjunction with the library, Year 7 and 8 will have fortnightly reading lessons. The purpose of these lessons is to further encourage students to actively read and develop their awareness of the varied writing styles and structures, whilst additionally broadening their vocabulary. Additionally, there will be allocated fortnightly literacy lessons in Year 7. These lessons will focus on six specific comprehension strategies. These include:

• Making connections (text to text, text to self and text to world)
• Making and revising predictions
• Questioning
• Summarising
• Determining the most important ideas
• Making inferences

Throughout these lessons, students will have the opportunity to read with purpose, deconstruct writing and make meaning of both fiction and non-fiction texts. Following explicit teaching of reading strategies, students will gradually move to guided writing tasks.

Following various diagnostic testing such as PAT reading, we have identified the continuous need for library reading lessons as well as integrating subject-specific spelling lists into all subject classes. Additionally, in Term 4 there will be weekly literacy lessons that focus on grammar, punctuation and spelling.

During Term 1, Year 9 students will explicitly focus on spelling, grammar and comprehension. This leads into their NAPLAN testing. Additionally, Year 9 will continue working on Education Perfect to consolidate their literacy skills.

Across Year 7 – 10, there will be a continued focus on TEEL paragraph writing. This scaffold will be explicitly modelled across all subject areas so to strengthen writing and analysis. Specifically, there will be exemplar responses provided for each assessment task across Stage 4. These will be explicitly taught, decoding not only why it is effective, but how it is effective. By providing students with a detailed model of success, we are aiming to provide the students with greater opportunity for both academic success and confidence in their writing ability.

We here at the College have an exciting year ahead of us. One where we will be fostering confidence and personal growth within teaching and learning. These successes will be visual for all students as they will be able to track their progress through pre, mid and post-testing so to see the growth in their learning.

Kaitlyn Abbott-Atchison
Literacy Integrator