Competence in English enables students to examine God’s word, appreciate and learn from others and their own experiences, giving order and meaning to their life. It will enable them to communicate their thoughts and feelings and be an active community participant.
As a school we need to constantly reflect on our teaching practices to ensure they are aligned with our primary purpose of inviting, nurturing and empowering students and teachers to play their part within God’s unfolding story of redemption.
A new English curriculum for NSW schools
This year marks the first year that NSW schools must implement a new English curriculum. The new English curriculum developed by NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), is an exciting prospect for teachers, students and parents as it is backed by almost 30 years of research into the way our brains learn how to read. Although this is a new curriculum, many schools have been a part of a shift towards more evidence-based teaching practices for many years with the aim of producing highly literate students who engage confidently with text.
At Illawarra Christian School we have been moving towards a more evidence-based approach of teaching reading and writing for the past five years, as we strive to equip our students to engage in the transformative work they have been invited into. Here are some of the biggest changes that we have been refining over the past few years:
1. Oral Language Development
There is a significant emphasis on the development of oral language. Oral language skills form the foundation of literacy and academic success.
A solid foundation of oral language helps children become successful readers, and strong communicators, as well as increasing their confidence and overall sense of well-being. The development of oral language requires a high-quality language environment which in turn creates a high-quality learning environment.
This can be achieved at home as well as families build a curiosity around words and encourage the use of the rich vocabulary that is found in those library books that come home!
2. Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Knowledge
The biggest changes to the new English curriculum for K-2 is the move towards a teaching of systematic phonics as a core part of the early years reading curriculum.
Phonics is the relationship between speech sounds and their letter symbols, the methods used to teach that relationship, and the process of using letter-sounds relationships to sound out (decode) words.
We explicitly and systematically teach students individual letter-sound correspondences and the way in which they can be blended, segmented and manipulated to read and write words. This means you won’t see a long list of sight words being sent home each week to be memorised, because this is not how the brain most effectively learns to read words.
In the initial stages of reading, the number one strategy that students need to learn is to identify the individual sounds represented in the word and blend them together to read the word. It is a strategy that will set students up for future success as they come across more complex vocabulary throughout their reading lives.
3. Data-Informed Teaching
We continually monitor the development of these core areas, to identify the skills that students have acquired. This provides us with a baseline from which to determine whether students are on track to meet curriculum outcomes. In addition, we are able to detect the gaps that exist in student knowledge and ascertain the intensity of intervention the student will require to fill those gaps.
As we continue to develop our evidence-based practices to prepare our students in the most effective way we can, we are aware that we are not merely preparing our students to be confident consumers of knowledge. We are preparing our students to be curious, courageous, compassionate, life-long learners so that they can transform the communities in which they live.
Mr Caleb Jones
Director of K-6
