English (Literacy)
English at Aspendale Gardens Primary School is teacher guided and student centred. Students are explicitly taught skills and strategies to suit their individual needs and to become proficient users of English in all aspects of their daily life. Teachers observe students’ ability to demonstrate and apply these skills by looking at what they say, make, do or write through authentic experiences that are linked to their units of inquiry.
The English program aims to teach students to:
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learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts.
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appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others.
The whole-school approach to reading is grounded in the Daily 5/CAFE reading program. This is a program that provides independence, choice and unique learning opportunities. The program is such that teachers explicitly teach reading strategies to improve comprehension, aide accurate decoding, fluency, expression and expanding their vocabulary. Students are then provided the opportunity to practise personal goals through a choice of five literacy activities which they undertake independently of the teacher. This provides an opportunity for teachers to conference with students one on one and allows time to assess their reading progress and identify and set personal reading goals
The five literacy activities are:
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Read to Self
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Read to Someone
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Listen to Reading
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Work on Writing
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Word Work
My Literacy
My Literacy® is a differentiated formative assessment model with an interactive teaching and learning function aligned to the Victorian and Australian Curriculums.
My Literacy® enables students to progress through each curriculum content description, automatically differentiating an online curriculum based on their achievement standard results. My Literacy® works in conjunction with our online assessment program which automatically differentiates the curriculum within each strand and sub-strand based on the achievement standard results of each student.
My Literacy® can be personalised for each student or group, depending on your requirements, and embeds the results and analysis within your online assessment program resulting in growth in students' knowledge and improved literacy outcomes across your school.
Wushka
Wushka is a cloud-based digital school reading program, carefully levelled to support students learning to read. Wushka has been developed using decades of educational publishing experience. The extensive selection of over 600 fiction and non-fiction levelled readers are stored in Wushka’s coloured digital reading boxes. Every levelled reader is supported by an online comprehension quiz and printable teacher support material including lesson plans and assessment and progress tracking. Wushka complements any current reading program with levelling aligned to a range of different systems. Teachers can easily manage and track reading groups for at school, and at-home reading.
Wushka Reading Boxes are carefully levelled from Magenta (Levels 1-2) through to Black (Levels 31+) encompassing a very broad range of engaging fiction and non-fiction School Readers. The student’s classroom teacher sets the appropriate reading levels and reading groups for both school and home. The School Readers have optional highlighted text and narration which are useful for guided reading.
Supporting English at Home
Please find below a document explaining how you can support the development of English at home. This file also contains some links to other supports and resources that you can use to help develop your child's love of English.