At St Gregory the Great School we teach English at each student’s individual point of need. We aim to provide our students with the skills necessary to thrive in an ever-changing world.
At St Gregory’s, our vision for literacy is that every child has access to high-quality, evidence-based literacy instruction. Therefore, each day our students engage in purposeful activities across Reading and Viewing, Writing, and Speaking and Listening. The content for these sessions is drawn from the Victorian Curriculum
All learners are supported through explicit, scaffolded, and evidence-based teaching practices. Our teaching and learning programs are underpinned by the body of research known as the Science of Learning, which explains how the brain learns to read and identifies the most effective instructional approaches. This research advocates for the explicit teaching of skills to support student learning
Our structured literacy lessons include specific skill development in oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
At St. Gregory’s we use a Systematic Synthetic Phonics approach to teaching the 44 speech sounds of the English language from F-6.
In Foundation to Year 2, we follow the scope and sequence of the InitialLit program—an evidence-based, whole-class literacy approach that provides all children with essential core knowledge and a strong foundation to become successful readers and writers. Through daily activities from the Heggerty Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Program, along with our extensive range of decodable texts, students have plenty opportunities to apply their phonic knowledge and practise blending sounds.
In Years 3 to 6 at St Gregory’s, students engage in novel studies designed to develop their comprehension skills through authentic, literature-rich texts. These lessons focus on building vocabulary, exploring sentence structures used in writing, developing knowledge across a range of topics, and exposing students to a variety of writing forms and genres.
St Gregory’s has a range of interventions to support students who require further assistance in the area of Literacy.