At Warrnambool East PS students study Literacy daily, generally in a two hour Literacy Block. Literacy is inclusive of the 6 components of successful reading incorporated and delivered through Core Literacy: phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, reading and writing fluency and English. During the English block students are exposed to rich literature through read-alouds, building vocabulary, comprehension and background knowledge. Students respond to texts through sentence, paragraph and text level writing.  The teaching of reading and writing is integrated within our literacy program.

As students master the ability to decode new words in early primary school, they switch from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. From here, students continue to receive explicit teaching that deepens their knowledge and vocabulary throughout the school, so they can comprehend what they read — the ultimate goal of reading.

With rigorous assessment and planning processes in place, we develop a structured and sequenced approach to explicitly teach new content. We use a Multi-Tiered System of Support for identification of learning gaps and purposefully provide strategic supports through appropriate modifications, adaptions, interventions and individual plans to support all students to be successful in their learning.  Interventions are based on point of need and are provided in response to available resourcing.

Literacy is taught a minimum of 10 hours per week.