English

Maintaining and improving the standards of achievement in Literacy is a focus at Craigie Heights Primary School. The English curriculum aims to ensure that students learn to listen to, read, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose.

In every classroom we have a literacy block, a dedicated time for teaching and learning the different areas of English. The content taught in English is defined by the Western Australian Curriculum. Students are assessed against the curriculum and reported through our Semester 1 and 2 Reports.

Our priority areas are Oral Language (in the early years) and Writing. The process implemented across the school to ensure consistency in these focus areas is called ‘Talk 4 Writing’. It’s a very contemporary model for teaching writing that incorporates what research says works most effectively, such as explicit instruction, modelling, giving rich feedback and students self-assessing. There are 3 stages to the process

• Imitation – students learn a model text through making a story map and learning it orally first, along with actions. This helps students to learn patterns – patterns such as text structure, sentence structure and language features.
• Innovate – students adapt this model text by substituting, altering and adding.
• Invent – students draw on what they have learnt about the text, language and ideas to create their piece of writing.

Teaching in the early years reflects explicit teaching of phonological and phonemic awareness skills to Kindergarten and Pre-primary students and oral language skills to strengthen the development of foundation literacy skills.