Literacy
At St Carlo Borromeo we believe every child needs to develop essential literacy skills and strategies in order to gain confidence, a sense of enjoyment and knowledge in using multi-literacies to actively participate in an ever changing world.
Our collective responsibility as a school is to continually improve student literacy learning outcomes while meeting the challenges of contemporary personalised learning.
St Carlo’s is committed to:
Setting high expectations of achievement in literacy learning with individual student’s goals.
Building a culture of best practice in literacy learning and teaching that is relevant to all students while supporting students withspecial needs.
- Creating a classroom climate rich in skill development where the students learn how to apply their literacy knowledge in different contexts and for different purposes in a variety of
- situations in other learning areas. The students learn to use traditional and new contemporary technologies.
- Continually planning and assessing in literacy so that learning and teaching is informed by evidence of student progress.
- Embedding various intervention strategies as part of the whole literacy learning program allowing for continuity of support and smooth transition from one year level to the next.
- Continual Professional learning opportunities for teachers to extend their professional knowledge and expertise that will transpire into innovative classroom practice.
- Literacy leadership as part of the school’s leadership team which promotes and embeds the literacy policy by modelling and mentoring a culture of excellence in literacy learning. The leader maintains a visible presence in classrooms providing continuous teacher learning followed by planning collaboratively and strategically with teams for school improvement.
The literacy program at St Carlo’s is highly structured with targeted teaching using the Victorian Curriculum on a daily basis. In the year levels from Prep to Year 2 the students engage in a two hour literacy block learning and acquiring the skills for reading, writing, speaking and listening. Years 3 to 6 are required to provide a minimum of one and half to two hours of daily instruction in literacy across the school week.
Literacy teaching is integrated into all areas of the curriculum so that learning connects the students to the real world providing relevance and purpose. The students are taught to appreciate the language of English through a variety of literature such as picture story books, novels, poetry, plays, films. They learn to read and comprehend information and everyday texts like instruction manuals, recipes, newspapers etc.
St Carlo’s prides itself on the support offered to students with specific needs and curriculum support. We encourage students to strive to achieve their best.
A differentiated approach is necessary and specifically designed to meet all the student’s needs. Many intervention programs are offered at St Carlo’s to students who require additional support in reading fluency and comprehension skills. These include: Reading Recovery, PERI (Phonological Early Reading Instruction), LLI (Leveled Literacy Intervention), Speed Reading, RIDER (Read, Image, Describe, Evaluate, and Repeat), RAP (Read, Ask questions, Paraphrase), ERIK (Enhanced Reading Intervention Knowledge).