At Papanui Primary we are beginning to implement a structured approach to literacy with the aim to raise learner achievement and increase teacher knowledge. A Structured Literacy approach is a highly explicit and systematic way of teaching all important components of literacy. These components include both foundational skills (e.g., decoding (reading), spelling, handwriting and letter formation) and higher-level literacy skills (e.g., reading comprehension, written expression).

This is a wonderful video from Learning Matters which gives a brief explanation of the Science of Reading. It also explains how you can support learning at home, some of the resources that your child may bring home and how this will progress over your child's structured literacy journey.

Liz Kane is passionate about literacy learning and supporting structured literacy in NZ schools. She has made a series of videos to support parents (teaching at home) and teachers. This video focus' on phonemic awareness and showing you how to blend and segment sounds in words. This is an essential skill for reading and spelling. She takes you through a simple activity you can do at home.

This is another video to support learning at home. Advanced phonemic awareness is where we ask children to change a sound by either adding a sound, delete a sound or substitute a sound in a word. It adds another layer to the blending and segmenting from video 1.

Carla McNeil from Learning Matters has shared a wonderful video to help support teaching handwriting at home. She says, "Teaching our children to correctly form their letters both supports their sound/symbol to letter correspondences and also enables them to write freely and with relative speed. This video highlights the importance of teaching handwriting as well as showing you ways to do this to build memory for movement and memory for sound to symbol associations."

Parents and caregivers, 20 minutes of reading to or with your child are the most important minutes of each day. Reading with a child every day nurtures vocabulary, language, and early literacy skills. It also builds the child's confidence to work through challenges and persistence in difficult tasks, and develops social and emotional skills, which are just as essential to school success.

Balanced and structured literacy are two different approaches to teaching reading. They have some things in common and some very different ways to approach the teaching of reading and writing. At PPS we have traditionally used a "balanced approach" to teaching literacy. It is how we were taught to teach at Teachers' College. After extensive reading and research into the science of reading, we now see things in a different light and advocate for a structured literacy approach to reading.

This guide can give you an idea of the elements of a structured literacy lesson so that you can see some of the language that may be used by the teacher and what is expected of the child. Lessons will vary in length, depending on the time available. We recommend a lesson length of no less than 15 minutes. It will likely take several lessons for a child to be able to move to fluency with a decodable text as we will be teaching new sounds each time.