English in the Early Years
In our Early Years, we use a systematic synthetic phonics approach using the Department for Education’s R-2 ‘Phonics and Spelling Scope and Sequence’ . We teach an evidence-based whole-class literacy program providing all children with the essential core knowledge and strong foundations to become successful readers and writers.
More about our program
Our program incorporates daily lessons in phonemic awareness, reading and spelling as well as rich language instruction using children’s literature.
Our program incorporates the key components necessary for early reading instruction – phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
Our teachers use this approach to systematically and explicitly teach the alphabetic code in a set sequence. In addition to learning letter-sound correspondences and how these are applied to reading and spelling, children are introduced to common morphemes and simple grammatical concepts.
At Modbury School P-6, we use the Department for Education’s R-2 Phonics Scope and Sequence, which aligns with the range of decodable texts commonly found in South Australian schools. It includes:
- reception, year 1 and year 2 phoneme-grapheme (sound-letter) correspondence tables with flexible boundaries between year levels
- continual revision of previously taught phoneme-grapheme correspondences
- recommended stop and check points to monitor student growth and effectiveness of tier 1 instruction
- prompt words, instructional information and word examples for reading and spelling
- guidance for teaching morphology
In Years 3-6, we use the Department for Education’s Spelling and Morphology Scope and Sequence.
The benefits of Modbury School P-6 implementing a systematic synthetic phonics program ensure that our staff teach single letters, common letter combinations and the sounds they represent in a discrete, systematic and explicit way. Research indicates this is the most effective approach to learning phonics. It supports students to:
- understand the relationship between sounds (phonemes), letters (graphemes) and letter combinations
- practise segmenting and blending letter-sounds to read and spell words
- expand their vocabulary
- decode text fluently
- use their letter-sound knowledge to write.