DISCOVER how Mount Blowhard Primary School implements an evidence-based reading program for young learners, this Sunday, 8 September.<\/p>\n
From 11am to 12pm, a free information session for parents, teachers and university students will cover explicit instruction, a systematic synthetic phonics program and the \u2018Big Five\u2019 of reading.<\/p>\n
Teacher, Zoe Bilton said the school hopes to educate the broader community about how reading instruction should look and how beginner readers learn best, aligned with research and evidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe teach reading using a systematic synthetic phonics program, meaning students are explicitly taught all speech sounds and the letter combinations used to represent them.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce students have learnt a couple of letters and sounds, they begin learning to blend and segment words containing the sounds they know,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also use decodable readers. This type of reader includes words that only contain the sounds that students have learnt so that they are not presented with words they are unfamiliar with, and prevents students from not using the sound out strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The school strongly focuses on fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, phonemic awareness and phonics, known as the \u2018Big Five\u2019 of reading.<\/p>\n
Although she had finished her degree, when she became a graduate teacher, Ms Bilton said she still didn\u2019t fully understand how children learnt to read, or the most effective teaching methods.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen beginning my role, my mentor and previous Prep\/1 teacher, Kelsie George, explained this evidence-based approach that they were using to teach reading, and I felt like it finally made sense,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n