Structured Literacy | Reading Through Our School Values: Curious, Capable and Auahatanga | Creativity

At our school, we use a structured literacy approach to help children become confident readers. This approach focuses on the sounds letters make and how to decode words and, further through the programme spelling skills. After about a term, your child will bring home one book to share with you each week. You’ll find additional details in their literacy book, and more resources are linked below.

Fostering Curiosity and Capability in Reading

• Explore letter sounds together (e.g., “m”) and practice writing them with the correct size and shape.

• Help your child break up words into sounds and blend them back together (e.g., t-a-p = tap). This video explains this process. 

• Learn non-decodable words (e.g., I, my, the) by heart. These words can be found in your child’s book or on their homework sheet.

• Review Stage 1–4 sounds | phonemes together using this helpful clip. Try slowing it down to 0.75 speed for clarity. 

We encourage children to read daily at home for enjoyment. You can make this experience creative and engaging by:

• Reading together every day: Share books, take turns reading, and talk about the stories.

• Encouraging exploration: Help your child understand tricky words by connecting them to real-world situations or explaining their meaning.

• Asking questions: Spark curiosity by discussing the story, predicting what might happen next, and asking questions like, “Why do you think that character did that?”

• Celebrating rhymes: Read nursery rhymes or poems and talk about the rhyming words. You can find examples here.

• Visiting the library: Explore a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books together to inspire their imagination and curiosity.

By nurturing a love of reading through curiosity, capability, and creativity, you’re helping your child develop skills that will serve them for a lifetime.

Writing at Home Through Our School Values: Curious, Capable, Auahatanga | Creativity

• Encourage curiosity about letters and words by helping your child write an alphabet letter and then searching for it around your home, garden, or in a book. 

• Encourage your child to hold their pencil correctly and form letters using the correct formation (refer to the sheet in their homework book).

• Explore the letters in their name, making sure that the first letter is upper case and the rest of the letters are lower case (no capital letters in the middle of words)! Talk about their name’s meaning or origin to spark interest.

• Create opportunities for them to ask questions through writing. For example, they can write down questions to ask a family member or a note to you about something they are curious about. Write or draw shopping lists. 

• Write notes and leave them in fun places like their lunchbox or under their pillow. Ask them to write replies, keeping the curiosity alive. Write words, labels and/or sentences together.

• Write notes or emails to friends or whānau.

Tip:
Let your child take the lead in exploring letters and words. Answer their questions with enthusiasm and encourage them to keep looking for answers through writing. 

Here are some handy tips for helping your child to read and write.

Further information can be found here, here or here. 

Kia ora,

STRUCTURED LITERACY

We are excited to be helping your little one with our fun, engaging and evidence-based literacy program this year.

 What can you expect?

We teach with Little Learners Love Literacy® – a structured and explicit program with engaging multisensory activities. It is carefully sequenced in seven stages to teach children the 44 sounds of the English language and the principles of the alphabetic code (that each speech sound can be represented by different groups of letters, such as the sound /ī/ as in I, sky, pie, ice, cycle, and that a letter (or group of letters) can represent different sounds, such as the letter ‘y’ in yes, gym, funny, sky.

Did you know that learning the alphabetic code gives children the knowledge to read and spell 84% of ALL words? (Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, and Rudorf, 1966)

We start with teaching the simple code in Stages 1–4. We will focus on phonics and phonemic awareness to build the strongest foundations for reading and spelling success. We will also focus on building vocabulary and oral language skills to develop equally strong foundations for comprehension and writing.

Meet Milo and friends

In the first few weeks of term, we will be learning our Stage 1 letters and sounds. We will be enjoying the Milo’s Birthday Surprise storybook, meeting a new character and sound regularly. We will also learn to blend sounds to say words with the Ally alligator puppet and segment them for spelling, as well as learning handwriting.

Decodable books

Once we finish teaching Stage 1 at the end of Term 1, we will start to send home Pip and Tim decodable books.

These are our secret to success – our ‘no tricks’ books. Each story practises the sounds and letters that we have taught, so children will be able to read the books themselves by sounding out and blending (and no guessing!).

How can you support your child at home?

Reading to your child

Read many books to your child and talk about what you just read. This is crucial for vocabulary and linguistic comprehension. Choosing a quiet time, such as bedtime, can help build an easy and fun reading routine.

Play with sounds

Read the Little Learners letter that we will send home each week. Ask your child the questions that are included with the letter. This will support the development of phonemic awareness (helping in the ability to identify, blend, segment and manipulate speech sounds within words).

Say the sounds

Say the ‘pure’ sounds without an ‘uh’ sound on the end; for example, ‘lllll’ rather than ‘luh’. You can listen to the sounds on the Little Learners Love Literacy® YouTube channel.

Practise decoding

When our decodable story books start to come home later in the term, encourage your child to sound out to read unknown words. Remember that this is the beginning of your child’s learning to read journey and, just as when they were learning to walk, your child will need support to build confidence in reading.

If you would like to find out more about the program, you can visit the website littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au, or ask your child’s teacher when the next ASP structured literacy 'open morning' is. 

Ngā mihi,

Nicky, Angela, Lesley, Ally, Tash and Debra

ASP Junior teachers.

Little Learners Love Literacy®

Teaching ALL children to read, write and spell with confidence.