At Belle Vue Primary School, our students are encouraged to view themselves as authors. We read with the view of authors being mentors we can learn from and we write to entertain, inform and persuade a particular audience. We endeavour to ensure our students engage in authentic reading materials and have opportunities to write for authentic purposes.
The staff at Belle Vue work collaboratively and undertake continual professional development to see that literacy is implemented in a supportive and stimulating environment. We prioritise the learning of literacy skills through a designated ‘Literacy Block’ every morning across the school. This ensures that the development of literacy skills are uninterrupted and students maximise practice and consolidation of their learning.
Our literacy programs are planned in accordance to meet Victorian Curriculum standards, sequentially developing and extending children’s literacy skills as they progress through the school.
Within our Literacy block there is a strong connection between reading and writing. Students are made aware of the connection and use their knowledge and understanding between the two to develop their own skills.
We undertake a range of ongoing assessment practices within literacy to ensure we understand the capabilities of our students and can identify their point of need. This then informs our planning and classroom programs.
At Belle Vue students are exposed to a rich variety of texts during daily reading sessions. This enables students to develop their skills and understanding in areas such as phonemic awareness (identifying and manipulating phonemes), fluency, accuracy, comprehension and expanding vocabulary. We value our engaging guided reading sessions alongside our take home readers program. These support the development of various literacy skills by nurturing confidence and enjoyment of reading within our students.
Belle Vue students are taught to think about their thinking whilst reading. They are explicitly taught reading strategies that good readers use before, during and after reading and then given the chance to practise these.
In order to immerse students in a wide range of texts, each grade has a classroom library, which is well stocked with books. The classroom libraries have texts catering to all interests and abilities. There is a range of fiction and non-fiction titles. Students are guided in developing the capacity to select ‘Just Right’ books, which are based on their own interest and ability. In addition to daily explicit teaching, each day students independently read books they have selected.
At Belle Vue, students learn to use authors as mentors and we use quality mentor texts as models when developing our writing skills. Here students can study the way authors use their words and structure their writing, which provides students with a model to emulate in their own writing.
At Belle Vue we utilise Big Write and VCOP (Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation) methodology to raise the standards of our writers. Based on the premise that ‘if they can’t say it, they can’t write it’, we scaffold the learning to allow children to become articulate thinkers and speakers, who will then become articulate writers. The program uses games, activities, talk, writing tasks and on-going feedback to develop the building blocks of correct and clear writing.
Having an audience is an important part of the writing process. It illuminates their purpose and makes the writing experience more meaningful and authentic. As well as regularly entering local writing competitions, we hold an annual Belle Vue Book Awards. During this event, all students from P-6 develop a narrative story, which is read by their peers and celebrated with the wider school community.
Throughout the entire day students at Belle Vue are given many opportunities to develop their formal and informal speaking and listening skills, as it is integrated into all areas of the curriculum. Students are taught the appropriate oral language for particular audiences and occasions, including body language and voice. They are also given many opportunities to develop active-listening strategies and engage in small group and whole class speaking opportunities.
At Belle Vue, we utilise the spelling program Words Their Way. It is a developmental spelling program, which has students work with level-appropriate word sorts in order to improve their understanding of the written language. Word sorts are simply a set of words that fall into certain spelling, sound, or semantic categories. They participate in hands-on activities that guide students to identify and learn patterns that exist in spelling. It is a sequential program with explicit teaching and systematic scope and sequence arranged into 5 spelling stages: