English

Tootgarook Primary School Literacy Vision

At Tootgarook Primary School, we ignite a lifelong love for literacy by providing high-quality, evidence-based instruction grounded in the science of how students learn. With unwavering consistency and dedication, we empower every student to become a confident, capable reader and writer, ready to embrace future challenges.

Guiding Principles

Commitment to excellence in literacy education.
Highest expectations for all students.
Belief in every child's ability to achieve their goals.
Building foundational literacy skills to thrive in an ever-evolving society.

To ensure that our students fulfill our vision for academic excellence, all students engage in 10 hours of English per week.

F-2

In our Foundation to Year 2 classrooms, we utilise the Little Learners Love Literacy program, a systematic synthetic phonics program with a clear scope and sequence. This ensures all students receive structured and explicit instruction that meets updated curriculum standards.

3-6

In our Year 3 to 6 classrooms, students participate in a structured literacy block that incorporates all aspects of Scarborough's Reading Rope. This includes the direct instruction program Spelling Mastery, which builds reliable spelling skills through a highly structured method blending the following approaches:

Phonemic approach - helps beginning spellers learn the relationships between spoken sounds and written letters and then apply them to spelling
Morphemic approach - exposes advanced spellers to prefixes, bases, and suffixes
Whole-word approach - gives spellers at all levels the meaning and root of a word and shows how the word's spelling is influenced

Additionally, students engage in novel studies within their Literacy Block, closely linked to their Humanities units. These studies focus on enriching vocabulary, building world knowledge, and developing reading fluency.