Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Manaiakalani Staff Share PLD

 These were our discussion points about structured literacy collated by Naomi.

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The group shared their reasons for wanting to get more of an understanding of Structured Literacy and shared prior knowledge. Matt shared how SL is associated with improvement efforts for students with dyslexia. Russell shared the principled literacy work they have been implementing at Tamaki College through their literacy specialist Mark Milford. Alka shared the literacy strategies she has been using to get students to identify keywords in text and vocabulary work for recalling subject-specific words. Karen shared successful approaches in Visual Arts for Scanning and Predicting. Jay shared a copy of the Effective Literacy Strategies handbook he has used in structuring literacy instruction in his subject area.

The government has made clear its plans for training teachers in SL from Years 0-3 but we still await direction on how SL will be implemented from Year 4, 7-8 and for the Secondary sector.

Naomi shared names of some of the main providers of SL in New Zealand: IDeal (See Ideal Matters); Liz Kane (Little Learners Love Literacy) and BSLA (Better Start Literacy). The Code is a useful scope and sequence for spelling patterns, rules, and morphology being adopted widely in schools. Here is a useful article in everyday terms on what Structured Literacy is and also from Cognition Education. It is likely that the government will provide a steer on both pathways for using SL approaches i.e. for reading intervention (e.g. Tier 2 students; those well below curriculum level) and for effective literacy instruction using a scope and sequence approach to teaching morphology for reading, spelling and decoding of challenging, and subject-specific vocabulary. The UK has a decent scope and sequence for spelling in their curriculum.

Sunshine are one of the only providers in New Zealand at the moment of decodable texts for older learners with age-appropriate content. It’s called The Reading Road series.

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