English Instruction at Westmeadows Primary School
Our daily instructional approach follows the Explicit Direct Instruction model, ensuring that our teaching is intentional, responsive, and targeted. This method allows all students to access the curriculum effectively. Through explicit instruction, students learn the foundational skills in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and thinking.
Structured Systematic Synthetic Phonics approach
Recognising that literacy is the foundation for all learning, we emphasise explicit, systematic instruction in essential literacy skills during the early years. These encompass word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting, sentence construction, and academic talk. As students progress through year levels, they apply, refine, and expand these essential skills in increasingly complex ways.
Our Foundation to Year 6 students receive daily instruction in reading and spelling by being taught the link between letters and speech sounds they represent. Teachers are guided by a sequence of speech sounds and as students progress through year levels they are taught to read and spell increasingly difficult words by drawing on the teachings of phonics (letter-sound knowledge) taught spelling patterns and rules or knowledge of word origin and word meanings through morphology.
Our Foundation students follow the Little Learners Love Literacy program to guide this teaching and our Year 1 to 6 students utilise PhOrMeS.
Knowledge Rich Curriculum
At Westmeadows Primary School, we follow the evidence base that a strong English curriculum is built on a knowledge rich, language rich and text rich environment. This is designed to enhance reading comprehension and overall literacy by fostering language proficiency and profound understanding. This equips students to comprehend and interact with increasingly complex texts across various subjects as they advance through their education.
We ensure that our English curriculum is seamlessly integrated with Humanities, allowing students to cultivate their background knowledge and expand their vocabulary. This integration encompasses non-fiction texts intertwined with subjects such as History, Geography, Civics, and Citizenship.
The Writing Revolution
The Writing Revolution is an explicit set of evidence- based strategies for teaching writing. This approach builds from sentence level writing to compositions of texts. The Writing Revolution (TWR) transforms instruction across the curriculum through a proven, coherent method that enables all students to develop the literacy and critical thinking skills they need to engage productively in society.
At Westmeadows Primary School, we believe that understanding content and acquiring vocabulary through content learning are essential for successful reading comprehension. Without a broad base of knowledge, children’s reading comprehension cannot improve. Therefore, we prioritise background knowledge, vocabulary, and fluent decoding as core components of reading comprehension.
Using The Writing Revolution’s method, we effectively teach writing skills and content simultaneously. We understand the necessity of explicit writing instruction from the Foundation level, recognising that sentences are the fundamental building blocks of all writing. When integrated into the curriculum content, writing instruction becomes a powerful educational tool.