Data showed they didn’t know any words or letter sounds or have key concepts about print. The catalytic change was to build the foundations as quickly as we could in the first two terms (something that would usually take a year) so we could then have a basis to build the Year Two curriculum upon.
A foundation skills programme on steroids! I felt that changing practice in my room alone was not enough and that the sharing of effective practice would lead to change across our school.
So what did this look like?
A balanced literacy programme; consisting of a strong Yolanda Soryl phonics based programme, alongside explicit teaching of decoding strategies like rereading and reading on, explicit teaching of Comprehension Strategies from the work of Alison Davis and hands on language experiences to build oral language and ignite a love of writing with the purpose of sharing their ideas.
Knowing this was contradictory to the current trend of a structured literacy approach, I wanted to see if my hunch as having phonics be an important piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle of skills and knowledge needed to learn to read, not the whole approach, would catch our students up to be working within the expected level.
After analysing my own teaching what I was doing well and what I wasn’t… I created steadfast daily routines, I used modeling books for the first time in years, this focused my teaching and gave the students a visual.
We created a ½ hour dynamic phonics program each day which you could hear singing out of the classrooms as you walk through the hallways.
We explicitly taught comprehension strategies to get our students thinking about the texts and used puppets to explicitly teach decoding strategies to help students when they got stuck on words.
The easiest thing to change was our daily routines, having the PLC as a team, and setting aside time in our team huis to discuss our Literacy programme meant we could share the journey, supporting and bounce ideas of each other.
The hardest thing was that we were all at different rates of change and coming at different entry points. The acceptance that change of teacher practice takes time is the hardest thing for me, who wants it to happen with urgency, to accept.
My big takeaways from our programme is that it took just one term for our students to go from not knowing any sounds to knowing all initial letter sounds, being sound out CVC words and to manipulate the sounds within words and to be moving on to learning diagraphs. This was amazing and at the same time, the students also gained a memory of high frequency words.
They could also not only explain what visualising, inference and retelling were but could totally use these strategies to understand text. These comprehension skills they can build upon throughout their education.
They also love writing to share their learning gained through the hands on vocabulary activities. This has spread through our Junior school.
It is a whole approach which I believe will give students a solid foundation to build future literacy learning upon.
We as a team have worked super hard, it was relentless but we have so many of our students move from pre-level 1 to working within the expected level the hard work has paid off big time.
