Literacy blocks begin with a daily warm up, which is a fast paced, engaging session that requires a recite, recall and apply component. Research indicates that this will ensure that our students retain key concepts into their long term memory. We utilise the ‘Let’s Decode (Formentin,1992) in K-2 as an explicit approach to teaching phonological awareness and systematic decoding instruction. Years 3-6 utilise PhOrMeS which is a systematic, synthetic phonics (SSP) and teaches children how to read and spell words from the bottom up.

Novel Studies
At MSPS, students in Years PP – 6 engage in units of work called Novel Studies. This integrated approach to literacy covers all aspects of a literacy block including phonics, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, grammar, handwriting, reading and writing. Novels have been pre-selected to ensure low variation across classes. Class novels are used as a theme for integration across other learning areas/tasks (i.e. writing task, Visual Art, HASS, Design and Technology etc.)

Novel Studies attends mainly to the Language Comprehension strand of the Reading Rope. It is important that teachers also use novel studies to foster an enjoyment for reading.

Writing
The Writing Revolution provides teachers with an evidence-based and proven instructional methodology. The methodology rests on explicit, carefully sequenced instruction, building from sentences to compositions. The Hochman Method is not a separate writing curriculum but rather an approach designed to be adapted to and embedded in the content being taught in any subject area and at any grade level.