At Taranganba State School, we are committed to high quality, evidence informed teaching and learning practices. This ensure that our school remains on the cutting edge of best practice propelling our students learning forward.
Literacy Blocks:
On four mornings per week between 8:45 am and 9:35am, all students from Prep - Year 6 engage with our 'Literacy Block'. This is an uninterrupted 50 minutes where students receive explicit teaching of new literacy concepts, or review previously taught material. The structured literacy block approach means that TSS is clear, efficient and focused on equipping students with the skills and knowledge they need to have strong foundations in literacy (Seamer, 2021)
Across all classrooms, students engage in:
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Literacy Daily Reviews – 10 minutes | Literacy Daily Review - 10 minutes |
Explicit Teaching – Letters and Sounds – 20 Minutes | Explicit Teaching – Spelling/Morphology – 20 Minutes |
Fluency Reading - 10 Minutes | Fluency Reading - 10 Minutes
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Explicit Teaching Vocabulary – 10 Minutes | Explicit Teaching - Vocabulary - 10 Minutes |
Daily Review:
During the literacy Daily Review, teachers and student revise previously taught literacy content on a rotating basis. Based upon The Forgetting Curve, teachers provide students with Recite, Recall and Apply questions that assist students in committing new learning to long term memory.
As seen below, each time a student revises previously taught content, the more likely that knowledge or skill is committed to long term memory.
Fluency Reading:
Reading fluency is the ability to read accurately, quickly and expressively. For students with good reading fluency, reading becomes a natural, enjoyable and meaningful experience. In contrast, for low progress readers, reading is a slow, halting and error-prone experience where the reader is unlikely to understand what has been read.
At Taranganba SS, our reading instruction focuses on fluency and is deliberate, differentiated and targeted to individual needs. We talk about Fluency with our EARS.![]()
Vocabulary:
Vocabulary is the strongest predictor of reading success. Research suggests that for students to understand a text, they must know to 92% of the words in the text. At TSS, we focus on four types of Vocabulary; Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing and work to progress students through the 4 stages of vocabulary building.
During Vocabulary instruction, students are explicitly taught two tier 2 words from their unit work each week.
A strong start at TSS:
