Academic Programme

Our children are encouraged to learn through hands-on, free play under the guidance and facilitation of our nurturing teachers.

A safe, nature-based environment allows our children to simply be children as they develop through a multi-disciplinary approach to self-discovery and exploration. At Clifton, we endeavour to champion childhood. We have intentionally created a space where each child can thrive in an environment that caters to their individual academic, social, emotional and physical needs.

At Clifton, we take pride in our ethos of tolerance, inclusivity and respect. Children are encouraged to explore, play and have regular brain breaks on the playground before coming back into the classroom to fully engage in their class work.

In Grades 1 to 3, we focus on the three learning areas: Numeracy, Literacy and Life Skills.

Literacy

Phonics and reading

We Follow the Time2Read programme. Our phonics and reading programme is built into our daily Literacy offering. The emphasis is on the enjoyment and enrichment children receive by being meaningfully involved with text. Our children engage daily with letters and sounds and learn to read with comprehension and understanding. As such, Clifton has adopted the Time2Read methodology to equip all our children with the necessary tools to become lifelong readers and spellers. From Grades 000 to 3 a strong foundation is paved for future learning. This is done by developing strong auditory skills and matching sounds to symbols, which gives meaning to the spelling and reading process.  We further encourage each child to move at their own developmental level in the reading room, matching books to their level of fluency and ability in our beautifully, resourced reading room. Providing each child, the opportunity to meet with success.

This is an important part of the reading and spelling programme. By introducing certain sound combinations children can recognise and spell unfamiliar words by sounding them out. A new phonic letter cluster is usually given every week. Learning the rules is of the utmost importance.

The ‘Time2Read’ programme covers understanding the rules of reading and spelling in a child-friendly approach.

The order of teaching and emphasis is, therefore:

• Letter sounds

• Letter chunks or syllables

• Single words

• Phrases

• Sentences

• Meaning

Spelling

We follow the Time2Read phonics spelling programme and introduce individualised, high-frequency words aimed at each child’s spelling level.

Every week the children learn words that follow the same spelling rule, with a few high-frequency words. The high-frequency words are taken from the Oxford programme and their written work or the theme we are busy with. The children are tested on these words every Friday.

Reading

Objectives:

• To expose the children to as much print as possible.

• To keep the pupils motivated to learn to read by providing a rich diversity of literature, including fiction, non-fiction, magazines, poetry, plays, newspapers, recipes and posters for them to select from.

• To let the children understand that there are many purposes and uses for reading and that learning to read is a lifelong process.

• Reading aloud pertinent and interesting books to the children to engender a love of books and reading.

• To make reading a lifetime habit for recreational purposes.

Basic assumptions about the reading process

Reading is a global activity rather than a collection of isolated skills. Meaning and understanding, therefore, is the initial and essential concern of the reading process.

Children whose parents become involved with their reading make the best progress:

• Read aloud to them every day

• Talk about the cover, the title and what you might expect

• Ask questions like, “What might happen next?”

• When you have finished, let your child ‘read’ and retell some parts of the story - point to the words if they are reciting them back to you.

• Be ready to re-read favourites - the more often the better.

In Grade 1 a child’s concept of print is developed by making them aware of the following:

• The front of the book- title and illustration.

• That the print tells the story

• Directional rules

• What is a letter, what is a word, and what is a sentence?

• Upper and lower case letters

• Function of the space, use of punctuation and paragraphs.

RAVE-O

In conjunction with the Time2Read phonics program and as an integrated approach to reading, RAVE-O (Reading, Automaticity, Vocabulary, Engagement, and Autography) forms an integral part of our approach to teaching reading. 

The goal of the RAVE-O (Reading, Automaticity, Vocabulary, Engagement, and Orthography) reading program is to create readers that are “accurate, fluent and have good comprehension.” This means that a child must be able to “utilise all the special knowledge [he] has about a word – its letters, letter patterns, meaning, grammatical functions, roots, and endings – fast enough to have time to think and comprehend” (Wolf, 2007, p. 130).  

RAVE-O intentionally targets the linguistic system as well as all underlying processing systems involved in reading, to facilitate the acquisition of reading skills. Through systematic training, each lesson aims to achieve accurate and automatic retrieval of words and the multiple components that are related to words, such as letter and letter-pattern knowledge, multiple meanings, grammar, and morphological endings as well as comprehension strategies that develop prediction, analytical and inferential skills (Wolf et al., 2009b).  

Guided Reading

Guided reading is small group reading instruction designed to provide differentiated teaching that supports students in developing reading proficiency. The teacher uses a tightly structured framework that allows for the incorporation of several research-based approaches into a coordinated whole. For the pupils, the guided reading lesson means reading and talking (and sometimes writing) about an interesting and engaging variety of fiction and nonfiction texts. For the teacher, guided reading means, taking the opportunity for careful text selection and intentional and intensive teaching of systems of strategic activity for proficient reading (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996).

Individualised Reading: Readers Room Readers

People respond individually to books, as our interests and tastes vary. The book should be the choice of the individual so that they are motivated. The child should meet with immediate satisfaction. The book must be at a level that the child can cope with. All the books are therefore graded to represent the levels of difficulty. The child can read widely at any one level and can attempt other levels when they so wish. In this way the child takes on much of the responsibility for their reading progress and so becomes an independent learner.

Reading is concept-driven. The reader brings prior knowledge to the text, and predicts, confirms or modifies their hypotheses while reading. They actively interrogate the text. These skills cannot be taught but are developed through reading. We learn to read by reading.

When your child reads aloud to you:

• Do praise their efforts

• Don’t expect them to be word perfect

• Help when they’re stuck.

• Don’t worry about mistakes…that’s normal.

Writing

The children are exposed to both creative and informative writing, which is linked to the theme work and Literacy Programme. Correct grammar, sentence structure and punctuation are emphasised throughout the phase, building on what has been taught the previous year.

Why the Language Experience Approach?

The relationship between the spoken and written language is recognised by the child - what I think, I can say. What I say can be written, and what is written I can read. So, their first reading materials are their own thoughts and experiences and are therefore individualised, interesting to them and vocabulary and sentence structure are easily processed because they generated them. Reading is meaningful and therefore the children see a purpose in print.