Karen Black Literacy Leader Karen Donnelly Sabrina George

• • • Karen Black – Literacy Leader Karen Donnelly Sabrina George Fiona Meilak Emma Sceberras

Reflections about our teaching practice at Kilsyth During 2014 we focused on the following areas: • Phonemic awareness • Story Grammar • Vocabulary • We used these key focus areas and introduced the concept in our guided reading sessions • At first it seemed like a big task to introduce new concepts into what we were doing already • Having the reflection process as we went, meant our teaching of each concept become focused, purposeful and we could see the benefits it had on our students

Teaching practice continued… • We implemented strategies into our teaching and this made for student focused teaching and learning • Reflecting on our lessons made us more aware of the way we interacted during our lessons. • We could see goals and a direction for oral language at our school

Reflections about your students: We noticed that students entered and exited oral Language at different stages and our guided reading sessions would allow us to focus on areas of oral language that needed attention. The oral language profiles were an excellent assessment tool to map out individual needs we were able to see what areas to focus on with each guided reading group and work towards consolidating these skills

students continued… • We noticed students becoming more aware of what they were saying • Some students grasped the new concepts quickly and other students needed more time with concepts • It really focused our teaching and in turn provided students with the support they needed to assist their oral language development • We noticed the biggest difference in students ability to better construct a conversation with a peer and answer questions with greater accuracy

Planning for 2015: Our goal at Kilsyth Primary for 2015 is to implement Colourful Semantics across the school. Our goal began with professional development for the whole school at the end of 2014 which focused on what oral language was and how we can use it to focus our teaching at school. We have already launched the new year at school by running professional development on Colourful Semantics with Tracey Rowe and plans are underway for further professional development, teacher support and the stages of implementation for each term. To track student progress we will continue to monitor the progress of our Preps from 2014 as they travel through the school using the Oral Language Profile