Our Activities

Literacy

The Primary Language Curriculum  aims to support children to develop their literacy skills and enable them to progress at their own learning pace in oral language, reading and writing. This is what we in St. Patrick’s N.S. endeavor to do. From the beginning, children are immersed in language - listening to stories, active engagement in oral language activities and introduction to phonological awareness. Children are being prepared for reading as soon as they enter Junior Infants. 

Staff have done significant research on evidence based approaches to the acquisition of language, vocabulary and the skills needed to read. Based on the Science of Reading, the pillars of effective reading instruction are: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. A study by Ehri (2004) found that synthetic phonics, an approach in which children blend sounds to make words, is especially effective in teaching beginning reading in classrooms. A second study, by Johnston and Watson (2006) found that “Synthetic phonics develops phoneme awareness and gives rise to word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling skills significantly above children’s chronological ages.” 

Here in St. Patrick’s N.S, we have adopted the UFLI Foundations programme, a research-based synthetic phonics programme, which targets the following foundational reading skills: 

• Phoneme blending and segmentation practice 

• Accuracy and automaticity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences

• Decoding automaticity of words with previously learned concepts

• Explicit introduction of new concepts

• Decoding and encoding practice 

• Reading and spelling irregular words 

• Reading and spelling connected text

This programme is done with children up to and including Second Class and ensures that pupils develop the key linguistic elements necessary for reading.

To develop literacy skills in the middle and senior classes, classes undergo a series of small group activities, focusing on acquisition of vocabulary and the development of fluency and comprehension in their reading. Pupils in these classes also study at least one novel per year, where they are given the opportunity to analyze in more detail the styles of various authors as well as looking at skills such as identifying the author's intent, identifying the main points in a texts and using these to summarize the text. Pupils have regular DEAR (Drop everything and read) time in all classes to promote a love of reading for all.