Literacy
Reading, Writing & Spelling
Reading, Writing & Spelling
We welcome questions about how Literacy is taught at Yaldhurst, and specifically in Te Pihinga. We understand that the learning process might be different from what you experienced at school, and/or what you expected for your child.
We are so fortunate that we are much further on in our Structured Literacy journey than many other schools. All of our staff have undertaken intensive professional learning to ensure we are delivering the most up-to-date, evidence-based programmes, and are beginning another round of ministry funded professional learning to further update and review our teaching practice.
A few misconceptions we notice in the media, and the wider community are:
Structured Literacy is just phonics e.g. learning letter names & sounds
Structured Literacy is only about learning to read
Learning to read only involves reading books
Children need a new book every night and each book needs to be harder than the last.
Science has shown that learning to read and write is an explicit, systematic process of mastering knowledge and skills. Biologically, our brains are designed to speak, and recognise faces and objects - not to decipher symbols and attach sounds to them. Learning to read and write is not caught, it needs to be taught.
Our process is clear and is driven by our expertise on what is the best next step for each child. We go as fast as we can but as slow as we must to meet the needs of each child.
At each stage of our learning sequence children are:
Learning the graphemes (letter symbols) and the phonemes (sounds) - say, read, write. Remember there are 44 sounds in English, with even more representations
Blending the phonemes together to read words
Segmenting the phonemes in words and writing them
Learning to read and write Heart Words
Reading a group of words together as a sentence
Writing a group of words in sequence to make a sentence
Practising each of these steps until they are all automatic before moving on to the next stage
Every child is explicitly taught every thing that comes home. They may not have mastered it yet, but it will have been taught and we will be practising it at school. New resources (letter cards, words, books) will not come home until we have seen a child read and write at their current stage with fluency and automaticity.
These slideshows can be used at home to support children in their learning. Each slideshow includes opportunities to read at letter level, word level, sentence level and text level.
Pronouncing sounds correctly
This video explicitly shows how we pronounce each of the sounds in New Zealand English. Sometimes we can fall into the trap of adding 'ih' at the end of sounds - this is actually 2 sounds. For example - /t/ih/