WHAT HAPPENS IN LITERACY GROUPS?

• Each day students are explicitly introduced to a grapheme/ phoneme combination (these are the sounds we hear in words and how we write these sounds) or a literacy skill.

• Students then participate in group activities related to the focus or sound of that day. Each activity will focus on the development of a skill relating to the outcomes in the English Syllabus.

• The teacher will assign each student to a group according to their learning needs. Groups are flexible and can change weekly, in order to keep up with students’ evolving skills.

• The teacher will work with the students in small groups of 3 to 6 to explicitly teach reading and writing. Students not working with a teacher participate in carefully planned independent tasks to strengthen their literacy skills.

• Examples of other activities that students may do are:

- alphabet games focusing on sound identification

- building simple words using magnetic letters

- playing online educational games

- working on rhyming skills

- handwriting

- working on fluency and sight word identification

- activities designed to increase vocabulary

- practice with stretching words and blending sounds

- working on retelling stories and remembering key details

- reading with a peer or reading independently

-games that involve sound manipulation

-syllable identification