Literacy at Columba

Over the past year teachers at Columba have been considering the most effective, up-to-date method to support students in learning how to read, write and spell. We have now introduced the Jolly Phonics systematic phonics program in Foundation and the Junior school. We aim to teach ALL our children to read, write and spell confidently. Our program is supported by evidence-based research and includes phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary knowledge, fluency and comprehension. Jolly Phonics is sequenced into stages, allowing us to teach children the 44 sounds of the English alphabet in a sequential way.

At Columba we help students learn the link between letters and the speech sounds they represent. Our students learn sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes). We teach children that phonemes can be blended or ‘synthesised’ to form words. Reading starts not with whole words, but with the most basic sound unit, the phoneme (sound). The reading process involves decoding or ‘breaking’ words into separate sounds that are blended together to read an unknown word. At Columba Catholic Primary School, children learn how blending and segmenting words is a reversible process; if you can read a word, you can spell it! 

We have introduced many decodable books for students in the Junior school who are learning to read. These are books that are carefully levelled according to the sound knowledge students have gained. Students will bring home 3-5 take-home books for the week and are encouraged to read and re-read these books. These books will be at an easy level; your child should easily read these books to make reading fun and successful. The harder, trickier reading work will be done at school with the support of our staff. We are working to build up our collection of decodables so some students may still read ‘predictable’ texts occasionally.

We do not encourage children to guess the identity of an unknown word based on pictures, context, or the word’s first letter. Your child will be encouraged to identify all the sounds in the word and blend them together..reading..not guessing!

Nor do we have children memorise long lists of sight words e.g M100W words. Not all phonics approaches are the same!

At Columba, we introduce a small number of ‘tricky words’ that frequently appear in print. They may be regular or irregular, deviating from common phonics patterns (e.g. said, my, is, was, are). These are words that children need to 'learn by heart' initially as they cannot decode them just yet, for example, with the word - said - the tricky part is 'ai' in that we can hear the /s/ and the /d/ . We would say in this word, the a and i are saying e. Students can sound the s and d part of the word.

Following is a link to a recent article in The Age newspaper celebrating the great growth in a school who introduced a similar Literacy approach.

‘Results came really quickly’: How one tiny Victorian school turned literacy around