At Pascoe Vale North Primary School, English is taught in a knowledge-, language-, and text-rich environment. Through the English curriculum, our focus is to develop students’ speaking, listening, reading and writing skills.

We place a strong focus in the early years on explicit, systematic instruction in core literacy skills. These include alphabet knowledge, word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting and sentence-level writing.  PVN embeds a structured synthetic phonics program ‘Promoting Literacy Development’ from Years Prep to Year 4.  Students engage in daily practice of phonological awareness (speech sounds, syllables and rhymes) and phonics (mapping of speech sounds). Students are taught about base words, suffixes and irregular spelling patterns of high frequency words.  Students in the upper years extend their knowledge of vocabulary, morphology & spelling rules.

Instructional time in English

At Pascoe Vale North Primary School, students participate in 10 hours of English instruction per week. Instruction focuses on developing essential literacy skills, knowledge of reading and writing, knowledge for reading and writing, and building a love of learning, language, and literature.

The daily literacy instruction time is made up of 3 parts: Word study, Reading & Writing.   We use ‘The Reading & Writing Workshop model which is a framework that supports differentiation, & the implementation of a range of teaching approaches, balancing individual, small group and whole class instruction. This model is underpinned by the Gradual Release of Responsibility: ‘I DO - WE DO – YOU DO TOGETHER - YOU DO ALONE’