Literacy

Literacy At Lathlain Primary

As its foundation, Lathlain’s English program is designed using the Western Australian Curriculum and balances and integrates the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy.

All students have the opportunity to consolidate learning through guided, collaborative and independent activities. Learning is differentiated to ensure all students progress in listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing.

In conjunction with The Lathlain Way, Lathlain Primary School has adopted several whole school approaches to enhance the teaching and learning of English and to ensure that teaching is explicit, learning is inclusive and that concepts, skills and processes are continuously developed upon.

Talk for Writing

Talk for Writing has been implemented as a whole school approach for writing lessons. It provides all students the opportunity to succeed in and be excited by writing through direct scaffolding, visible feedback and rich oral language. Talk for writing places emphasis on three distinct areas:

  1. Imitation – Learning and internalising of a model text through rich oral language activities such drama, discussions, writing toolkits and shared reading.
  2. Innovation – Students develop their own modified version of a model text with assistance, scaffolding and feedback from the teacher where needed.
  3. Invention (Independent Application) – Students use the skills learnt to create their own original texts.

These stages aim to improve writing ability by giving students ideas of the various structures and tools used by writers.

Reading

Lathlain currently uses two distinct whole school reading approaches. Guided reading is used in most junior primary classrooms whilst upper primary classrooms have adopted a Cooperative Reading approach.

Developing fluency is promoted through the regular changing of home readers, which should be read repeatedly. Teachers will provide appropriate levelled strategies for parents to support home reading.

Home Reading is highly valued and encouraged through the use of not only take home readers and the digital reading platforms, Literacy Pro (Y3-Y6) and Reading Eggs. These programs aim to provide students with appropriately levelled texts to targets students at their point of need. Literacy Pro and Reading Eggs are programs which are also used to complement the school’s delivery English.

As with all home reading, these texts are not meant to be challenging. They have been set by the teacher to help children consolidate what they have learned in class and to promote the enjoyment of reading. Library books are also available to all students. Students are encouraged to keep track of their home reading through home reading logs and through Literacy Pro in Years 3-6.

Spelling

​Years 3 to 6 follow ‘Words their Way,’ a teacher-directed, student-centred approach to vocabulary growth and spelling development. Kindergarten to Year 2 classes use PLD’s Synthetic Phonics program for their spelling approach.