At Devon Meadows Primary School, the Victorian Curriculum is utilised to develop and implement teaching and learning that is meaningful for students, with a strong commitment to and focus on Literacy and Numeracy.
Literacy
Throughout their schooling, students at Devon Meadows Primary School are provided with opportunities to develop their skills in the three domains of the English language; Reading and Viewing; Writing; and Speaking and Listening. English is taught both explicitly within literacy sessions as well as through authentic contexts integrated across all curriculum areas.
Our whole school implementation of the Promoting Literacy Development Structured Synthetic Phonics approach (otherwise known as PLD) is aimed at benefiting all areas of literacy. With a particular focus on spelling, PLD’s evidence-based program focuses on teaching Structured Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in conjunction with motor and movement and speaking and listening skills.
The explicit teaching of phonics supports students to blend sounds to read words. At home reading is strongly encouraged and in the junior years, students are supported with take-home decodable readers. As our students’ progress and become competent decoders of text, our teaching focus shifts towards comprehension. Students are exposed to rich literature and provided with opportunities to question, make connections, infer meaning and develop deeper understandings about their world.
As students’ phonic skills develop, they begin to segment sounds to spell words with increasing difficulty. At Devon Meadows Primary School, teachers provide students with rich, authentic writing tasks that enable them to understand the purpose of the writing process. Our students are also explicitly taught the conventions of grammar, punctuation and handwriting to become successful writers and are exposed to a variety of writing genres including narratives, information reports, persuasive texts, recounts and poetry.
Devon Meadow’s Primary School provides a positive and structured environment to enable students to develop the skills and attitudes to become confident and capable learners in Literacy.
