English

At Oberon Primary School, every student participates in a 2-hour daily English block that is guided by the Big 6 of Reading (Konza, 2014): oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These elements work together to support strong, confident reading. We teach these skills through the following approaches:

Systematic Synthetic Phonics and Word Study

Students learn through a systematic synthetic phonics approach. They start by listening to the sounds in spoken words and then learn how these sounds are written. They come to understand that:

• Letters or groups of letters represent sounds – Example: “m” makes /m/ and “igh” makes the long /i/ sound.
• A single sound can be written with one, two, three or four letters – Example: the long /a/ sound can be represented as ‘ai’, ‘ay’ and ‘eigh’.
• The same sound can be spelled in different ways – Example: the /ee/ sound in see, sunny, happy and chief.
• The same spelling can make different sounds – Example: “ea” in beach, head and break.

Students also develop three important skills:
• Segmenting – breaking a word into individual sounds to support accurate spelling
• Blending – pushing sounds together to read words
• Manipulating sounds – experimenting with sounds to explore spelling choices

In Foundation to Grade 2, students also take part in daily handwriting practise and receive explicit teaching of early grammar concepts to support both reading and writing development.

As students move into Grades 5 and 6 and have mastered core phonics knowledge, the focus shifts to morphology and etymology to help them understand word parts and where more complex words come from.

Rich literature

Alongside phonics, we place a strong emphasis on rich literature. Students are reading high-quality fiction and non-fiction texts daily. Through discussion, they build oral language, learn new vocabulary, and develop comprehension. This shared background knowledge strengthens their ability to understand what they read and supports them to write meaningful, well-informed texts.

Decodable and non-decodable texts

In the junior years, children read a variety of decodable books matched to their learning needs to build accuracy, confidence and automaticity, as well as non-decodable books to broaden vocabulary and foster a love of reading. As students become proficient decoders, they no longer need decodable texts and confidently move into reading a wide range of rich fiction and non-fiction books.