Love of Learning - Literacy

Last term we completed our assessment for our structured literacy teaching and we have certainly hit the ground running.  We are beginning to see some exciting progress across reading and writing where students are beginning to apply some of the spelling patterns and decoding strategies in Reading and Writing.  

We are utilising a range of strategies throughout our ‘60 mins a day’ where students are able to practise and master different skills.

You might look at a simple task and wonder what teacher decisions are possibly at play with such a simple task.    

We got outdoors in the sun on Tuesday to practise our spelling, decoding and handwriting skills using chalk on the concrete.   Students completed a word chain with this week's BSLA focus.  

A BSLA word chain is grounded in scientific principles of how the brain processes language, especially in the early stages of reading. It targets phonemic awareness, a strong predictor of later reading success, by having learners actively manipulate sounds in a sequence of connected words.

Practicing word chains repeatedly helps consolidate the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

They strengthen the ability to process and recall sound patterns, which supports decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling).

Children learn how changing one sound alters the entire word meaning, promoting flexible thinking about language.

This is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

In a word chain activity, students are typically asked to change one sound in a word to create a new word (e.g., "cat" → "bat" → "bit" → "big"). This develops the brain’s capacity to focus on discrete phonemes.

Our students practise word chains in their writing books daily.  This time we are also practising using chalk.  

There is a range of material that describes the benefits of using chalk as a medium for writing or handwriting.  In a nutshell, chalk gives students the opportunity to ‘master’ that correct grip needed for handwriting automaticity.  It also gives sensory feedback that helps with muscle memory and letter formation.  

If you would like to learn more about our Better Start to Literacy Approach please come along to our BSLA Parent Workshop on Wednesday 07 April at 3.15pm or 5.00pm.