This week saw a very short week in classrooms at Wangala Primary School.  While we all enjoyed some sunshine on Wednesday’s public holiday, our teachers also joined together on our curriculum day on Thursday to continue to upskill ourselves in our new English Model.

While classrooms have explored different aspects of our new English Model throughout 2024, as of the start of next year, all our English lessons will begin to follow our new instructional model.  At the heart of our new instructional model in English is a focus on ensuring we’re hitting the mark for each of the ‘Big Six’.  The ‘Big Six’ are focused on oral language development and early literacy experiences, phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge (phonics) and word knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Our English Model comes in two iterations; the English Model P-2 and English Model 3-6, with marked differences in the way our students focus on phonics, phonemic awareness and spelling and morphology, as well as a different focus on handwriting and keyboarding skills in both.  Viewing our instructional model as a whole, students are engaged in explicit instruction throughout the first four stages which includes; Daily review of previously learned information which includes a review of letter formation, high-frequency words, phonemes, vocabulary, fluency and syntax; Phonics and phonemic awareness in our P-2s , focused on word building and word reading, and spelling and morphology focused on prefixes, suffixes, base words, contractions and homophones; Handwriting instruction linked to our phonics sequence in our P-2s, and a focus on handwriting and keyboarding linked to the phonics and morphology sequence; Fluency practice, focused on the concepts of accuracy, rate and prosody; followed by our writing segment, broken into; Vocabulary with concentration on Tier Two and Tier Three words; Comprehension; and Writing where we develop writer’s craft working through a writing cycle.

Underpinning much of our sequence will be the use of mentor texts.  Mentor texts are texts we utilise in the classroom as a focus text.  These could be any type of texts but are mostly high-quality picture story books and novels.  Our teachers spent a portion of the day yesterday developing the ‘Wangala Primary School Reading Spine’; our ‘go-to library’ of these high-quality texts.  It was great to explore these texts and begin to shape the sequence of these mentor texts across our yearly program of learning in 2025. 

I’m incredibly excited to see our new English Model P-2 and 3-6 embedded next year, and see the huge benefits this will have for our students and their growth!  Exciting times are ahead at Wangala Primary School.

Regards,

Steven King

Principal