Literacy

Literacy is a fundamental skill, essential for academic and personal success. At Our
Lady Star of the Sea, we follow an evidence-based approach to reading based on
research developed over several decades, often known as The Science of Reading.
This research identifies that teaching phonemic awareness and having explicit,
systematic phonics instruction, are both important for helping children learn to read.
At Our Lady Star of the Sea, students are given a well-rounded, research based
reading program that teaches them phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency,
vocabulary, oral language and comprehension in a clear and organised way. We
foster a love of reading through rich texts and a wide range of reading materials,
including the use of decodables as a reading tool in the early stage of their reading
journey.

Reading, Speaking and Listening and Writing are integral to each other. We follow the
Big Write methodology in our Writing program, where “If students can’t say it, they
can’t write it”. Students learn a variety of text types and their structures which are
taught and built on, in a sequential way over the primary school years.The
Soundwaves program complements spelling at Our Lady Star of the Sea, providing
phonemic awareness, synthetic phonics, morphology and etymology throughout the
whole school.

Students work at their own level and are engaged in an environment that promotes
collaborative learning. Explicit teaching and differentiated workshops happen within
the English part of the day and students strengthen and extend their literacy skills
through the integration of inquiry learning and other learning areas, identified in the
Victorian Curriculum.

Learning Support Teachers and Learning Support Officers are available in each hub
to provide additional support and we use a range of intervention strategies and
programs that are tailored according to the needs of the student.