Literacy
Literacy at Knox Gardens Primary School is a central priority, with the literacy block scheduled for the first two sessions of each day, timetable permitting. This extended and uninterrupted time reflects the school’s commitment to building strong foundations in reading, writing, speaking and listening.
The block is divided into two key components: Foundational Literacy and Applied Literacy. Foundational Literacy focuses on the explicit teaching of core skills including decoding, reading fluency, handwriting and spelling. Applied Literacy provides opportunities for students to practise and apply these core skills authentically through rich reading and writing experiences connected to carefully selected mentor texts.
Victoria’s approach to teaching reading at KGPS
Knox Gardens Primary School implements Victoria’s approach to the teaching of reading, which emphasises systematic, explicit instruction in the essential components of reading.
Students from Prep to Grade 2 participate in 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics each day, supported by Phonics Plus and Decodable Readers Australia resources to ensure a structured and cumulative progression of skills. This explicit phonics instruction is reinforced through decodable texts that align with students’ developing knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondences.
Alongside decoding, strong attention is given to building reading fluency—accuracy, automaticity and expression—through repeated reading, modelled reading and small-group practice. As students progress beyond Grade 2 and into reading mastery, they engage in literature groups, where they deepen comprehension, explore author intent and respond thoughtfully to texts in collaborative settings.
Learning through rich texts
In Applied Literacy sessions, teachers use high-quality mentor texts to anchor units of work. Texts such as The Mess That We Made by Michelle Lord, Purlka ngamaji Kakaji by Emma Bearwu, and Blueback by Tim Winton provide rich models for narrative structure, vocabulary, author craft and language features. Guided by these mentor texts, students explore uniquely Australian works alongside global perspectives, guiding writing units, supporting the explicit teaching of grammar in context, and promoting meaningful discussion and connections to students’ own experiences and other texts.
Through structured dialogue, literature circles and whole-class discussions, students develop key speaking and listening skills aligned with the Victorian Curriculum, including active listening, presenting ideas clearly, building on others’ contributions and using appropriate language features for different audiences and purposes.
Students learn to write a variety of genres throughout their schooling, including narratives, information reports and persuasive texts, all the while continuously developing sentence level writing craft and revision and editing skills.
Together, these approaches ensure literacy learning at Knox Gardens Primary School is explicit, evidence-based, engaging and deeply connected to their own lives and the wider world through authentic reading and writing experiences.
