Welcome back to all of our wonderful students and families! It has been so lovely to see how excited and happy our students have been to return to school. I hope everyone had a restful and joyous holiday.

Spelling Mastery

This week we started Spelling Mastery across our school from Year 1 to Year 6. We introduced Spelling Mastery to Years 3-6 last year and had such wonderful results, we decided to extend the program to Year 1 and Year 2. Kindergarten will start the first semester learning intial sounds through the Sounds~Write Program and will then transition to Level A Spelling Mastery in Semester 2. Alongside Spelling Mastery, K-2 will also learn the Let's Decode Program (phonological awareness and decoding) from Week 5 of this term. 

Spelling Mastery builds dependable spelling skills for students in Years 1-6 through a highly structured method that blends 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

Targeted Intervention & Support

This year we will provide targeted literacy intervention to a number of students across the school. Mrs Rebecca Neiberding (Inclusion Teacher) and Mrs Tiffeney Ronneberg (Inclusion Assistant) will be running small group intervention in Year 1 and 2 called MiniLit. Mrs Rebecca Neiberding (Inclusion Teacher) and Mr Jack Biilmann will be running small group intervention across Years 3-6 called Macqlit. The other members of our Inclusion Team will be running 1:1 intervention across Years 1-6 based on the MiniLit and MacqLit Programs. We are currently doing assessment on students across the school to ensure the intervention is tailored to the needs of each individual student. If your child has been identified to receive intervention, Mrs Rebecca Neiberding will contact you in the next few weeks. 

MiniLit is an evidence-based, explicit and effective early literacy intervention program for teaching reading skills to children who are in the bottom 25% of the expected range for their age group in Year 1 or 2.

MacqLit is an explicit and systematic reading intervention program for small groups of older low-progress readers. It provides teachers with a comprehensive sequence of lessons that includes all the key components necessary for effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Rebekah Brown