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

On Monday, we will start Spelling Mastery across our school from Year 1 to Year 6. This will run on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday morning at 9.05-9.30am. 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). 

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 continue to provide targeted literacy intervention to a number of students across the school. I would like to welcome out new Inclusion Teacher, Mrs Bethany Fear. Beth has been a classroom teacher at St John's for many years and we are excited to welcome her into the role of Inclusion Teacher. Beth and our Inclusion Assistants will be running small group intervention across the school. We will continue to use two programs that we had great success with in Semester Two last year. These are called Early Reading in Interventions (K-2) and Corrective Reading-Decoding (Years 3-6). We have completed assessments 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, we will contact you in the next few weeks. 

Early Interventions in Reading (K-2)

Early Interventions in Reading is an evidence-based program designed to help children build a strong foundation in reading. This program focuses on key areas of early literacy, such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. By engaging in fun and interactive activities, students will have the opportunity to develop critical reading skills in a nurturing and supportive environment.

Corrective Reading (Years 3-6)

Corrective Reading is an evidence-based program designed to help students who may be struggling with reading fluency, word recognition, and comprehension. This program is specifically tailored for older students who need assistance in developing essential decoding skills to enhance their overall reading proficiency.

If you have any questions about the intervention please contact myself or Bethany Fear (bethany.fear@cg.catholic.edu.au) 

Rebekah Brown