Teacher guide Smarter Schools approach to teaching beginning reading and spelling

TLF ID S7035

This is a teacher resource about the Smarter Schools strategy successful implemented by 30 Catholic and independent schools in Tasmania to improve the progress of students in reading and spelling. The strategy uses mainly an oral language approach to teaching phonics and phonemic awareness in an integrated and systematic way. The resource is organised in eight sections: Summary; Target student group; Method; Results; Lessons learned; Research base; Further reading and links; and Contacts. The resource concentrates on the letter and sounds component of the strategy.





Educational details

Educational value
  • This is a valuable resource for teachers and schools seeking to improve their students' attainment of the years F-2 English achievement standards in relation to reading and spelling and to implement content descriptions from the Sound and letter substrand of the English curriculum. It describes how the structured approach to teaching phonics was implemented consistently throughout the clusters of schools involved and how it was designed to be fully compatible with the wider, language-rich early years curriculum in these schools.
  • The resource makes clear the pivotal role of the letters and sounds approach from the UK. The strategy provides a detailed, systematic approach to teaching the phonics element of reading; uses a synthetic phonics approach to teach reading and spelling; identifies two dimensions of reading - word recognition and language comprehension; and follows a defined sequence of teaching and learning. Two schools using the strategy reported a demonstrable improvement in the reading progress of their students.
Year level

F; 1; 2

Learning area
  • English

Other details

Contributors
  • Contributor
  • Name: Education Services Australia
  • Organization: Education Services Australia
  • Description: Data manager
  • Copyright Holder
  • Name: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Organization: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.australia.gov.au
  • Publisher
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organization: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Description: Publisher
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.esa.edu.au
  • Resource metadata contributed by
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organisation: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: www.esa.edu.au
Access profile
  • Generic
Learning Resource Type
  • Online
  • Text
Rights
  • © 2014 Commonwealth of Australia, unless otherwise indicated. This material is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU) unless otherwise indicated. You may distribute, remix and build upon this material, provided that you include the acknowledgement '© Commonwealth of Australia 2014' and license under the same terms any new creations you have based on the material.