At Millner School, we teach literacy across all learning areas through integrated programs. In the Early Years our programs have a strong focus on oral language development as a foundation for achieving literacy outcomes. ReadWriteInc, in addition to a Structured Literacy Block, provides a whole school approach to improving literacy outcomes in our Transition-Year 6 classrooms. This resource, based on sound theory and research around Best Practice in literacy, provides a broad repertoire of processes to link assessment with our teaching and learning.
We utilise a wide range of strategies to support and engage students who come to school with languages other than English. Explicit teaching and scaffolding the English language is an important aspect of our literacy programs. Our literacy programs involve all students in identifying learning goals, particularly in Reading.
Read Write Inc
Teaching every child to read, regardless of background or need
Millner Primary School has invested in the highly regarded Read Write Inc literacy program.
Read Write Inc. Phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics, comprehensive literacy program. Children learn to read with accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The program also teaches handwriting, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and compositional writing.
Read Write Inc. (RWI) is a synthetic phonics program supported by the NT Department of Education for use in NT schools.
The program is based on research that says that children’s understanding of the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) is a strong predictor of success in reading. It aims to help children learn to read accurately, fluently and with good comprehension.
Through RWI phonics students learn the English alphabetic code, which includes 150+ graphemes that represent 44 speech sounds. The materials and strategies include:
- the use of simple mnemonics to help students grasp the letter-sound correspondence quickly
- the teaching of high frequency words that are not phonically regular as ‘tricky’ words that are practised frequently
- decodable readers that are closely matched to students’ increasing phonics knowledge to improve accuracy, fluency and comprehension.
As students learn the alphabetic code step-by-step through reading, they begin to apply their knowledge to write words and sentences.
RWI phonics is intended for students aged 4 years to 9 years. RWI Fresh Start is a phonics resource that can be used as an intervention for older students who haven’t developed phonics skills.
Read Write Inc – Oxford University Press