“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom for every child, irrespective of their unique abilities.”– Maya Angelou

At Leda ESC, we believe every child should have every opportunity for success in life. We also believe that literacy forms a key foundation of this success. Reading, writing and communicating underpin skills required for access to community, and furthermore, workplace engagement and success.

Across our school, we prioritise our literacy teaching and learning, including using programs such as Letters and Sounds and Talk4Writing. Teachers utilise intervention tools including Colourful Semantics, as well as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices and multisensory strategies to maximise student engagement within literacy.

Enhanced Letters and Sounds

Enhanced Letters and Sounds effectively targets the development of phonological awareness, reading, and spelling from Kindergarten through Year 6, delivered at point of need. The program aligns with the achievement standards outlined in the Australian Curriculum (English) and has been shown to significantly improve whole-school literacy outcomes.

Phase 1 begins in kindergarten, with a focus on elements of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) including listening to environmental sounds, listening to and making instrumental sounds, investigating body production, exploring rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and voice sounds. Students move into oral blending and segmenting of sounds in words and combining strategies for our non-typical learners.

Phases 2 to 5 include teaching of the single sounds, as well as additional sounds made up of 2 or more letters. Students learn to blend these sounds together to read words as well as segment these sounds to spell words. We are continuing to develop strategies to assist our non-typical learners, and combine tactile, visual and kinaesthetic learning as well as incorporating technology into our teaching.

Talk4Writing

Talk4Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett. It is based on the principles of how children learn, enabling them to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and writing their own version.

The Imitation Phase – The teaching begins with a creative ‘hook’ which engages the pupils, with enjoyment. A text map is then co-created with students, allowing them to internalise the text, its vocabulary and language patterns. Activities such as role-play and dress ups assist in deepening the student’s understanding of the text.

The Innovation Phase – Once students are familiar with the text, the teacher leads them through the process of making changes. This is through modelled and shared writing opportunities, adjusting characters, settings, dialogue in fiction texts as well as topics or steps in non-fiction texts. Visuals to aid communication are also vital in this step for many of our students, providing picture selections to support their idea generation.

The Independent Phase – Eventually, students move onto the third phase, applying what has been taught to write their own text.

Colourful Semantics

Colourful semantics is an approach to support spoken and written language learning across the curriculum, and it is also a common approach used in speech therapy. It aims to help children develop skills when it comes to sentence development, understanding questions, developing narrative, understanding written text and developing vocabulary. Colourful semantics are often used to support children with speech and language difficulties, including those who have difficulties with word order, vocabulary difficulties or expressive and receptive language difficulties. It can also be helpful for children who have English as an additional language.

As a teaching approach, Colourful Semantics can be particularly useful for children who struggle in any of the following areas:

• Putting sentences together in a meaningful order.
• Confusing the order of words in sentences.
• Missing out verbs and other key details in sentences.
• Having a habit of having to restart a sentence to get it in the right order when speaking out loud.
• Always using the same sentence structures.
• Have a limited vocabulary.

Colourful Semantics brings lots of benefits to children as it gives them confidence in their own ability to communicate.

Other benefits of Colourful Semantics include:

• Helping children to expand their vocabulary.
• Helping children to learn how to answer questions.
• Develop a child’s use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives.
• Improving their story-telling skills, as it helps them to form a narrative.
• Helps children make their sentences longer.
• Can be carried out individually or in small groups which build social skills.
• Ultimately will help children with sentence writing and language comprehension skills.