At Morningside State School, we believe that reading improvement is a priority for all students.
The Morningside Reading Framework is developed around 'The Big 6 of Reading' and our teachers are regularly involved in professional development in these six areas.
- Oral Language development: the ability to speak and listen.
- Phonological and Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in oral language.
- Phonics: the relationships between letters and sounds and decoding
- Fluency: the ability to read quickly and naturally, recognise words automatically, and group words quickly.
- Vocabulary knowledge: new words and what they mean.
- Text Comprehension: understanding what is being read and developing higher-order thinking skills.
We also engage in supportive processes that involve the analysis and discussion of reading data. This information is used to drive programs (e.g. RISE Reading), target the use of school resources, inform effective pedagogical practices and drive differentiation of teaching and learning in the classroom.
In addition, our students are actively engaged with guided reading in classrooms and teachers are explicitly teaching comprehension strategies throughout the term. As part of our Student Resource Scheme, ABC Reading Eggs and Reading Eggspress has been adopted as a resource to support reading improvement at home and within reading rotations.
Students in Prep to Year 3 have a RISE Reading Bookmark that details decoding strategies which students can use to 'attack' the text. These strategies can be used when reading a text with your child at home. Each newsletter unpacks one of these decoding strategies. Students in Years 4 to 6 will receive their decoding bookmarks during Term 3.
RISE Reading
RISE Reading is a targeted program that runs before school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. This is not an intervention program. Students are invited to attend this before school program based on their PAT-R (Comprehension) data. The students selected are performing at an age appropriate level and this program is targeted at continuing to improve and enhance their reading abilities.
The aim of RISE Reading is to explicitly teach students the skills needed to make inferences. The improvement in this comprehension strategy will assist students to readily make meaning of their reading and to interpret texts at a deeper and more reflective level. Working in small groups, students are engaged with a variety of text types, authors and vocabulary.