Literacy

At Brunswick North Primary School, we take a balanced approach to literacy instruction.

A structured synthetic phonics framework provides the basis for all literacy skills, our students learn these vital building blocks of language through targeted explicit instruction at their individual point of need. They move through the sequence of phonemes, supported by decodable readers that enable them to rehearse developmentally appropriate sounds.

Concurrently, students are exposed to a range of reading and writing experiences through a workshop model. They choose developmentally appropriate books from our classroom libraries, learning what books they love through a rich literary diet. With these texts they practise increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills, with a particular focus on critical literacy. This fosters a love of reading, whilst equipping them with the skills and dispositions to be informed and empowered citizens.

Students are empowered to have agency in their writing; they are encouraged to write about topics they choose for audiences relevant to them. Once engaged in the writing process, they are explicitly taught language and structural features relevant to different writing genres. Teachers work alongside students to set goals in both reading and writing, using whole class, small group and one on one instruction to explicitly teach skills.