OUR PROGRAMS
While trying to develop literacy skills within young children, the absence of any components of the oral language or motor skills will cause difficult learning and understanding for the children. Students with appropriate level of motor skills for their age group have enhanced co-ordination, body awareness, self-confidence and esteem.
As literacy content throughout the school curriculum becomes harder, a great amount of students struggle to meet Australian Curriculum standards in literacy due to their lack of literacy skills. We therefore have created the following programs which focus on each part which plays an important role for children to succeed in literacy learning.
Sylli-Turtles
(3-4 year old phonological awareness with syllables)
Syllable sounding is an important skill which leads to early learning of spelling and reading abilities. We teach syllable sounding through the use of body movement or colour objects or touching objects. It is a fun and engaging strategy to clearly teach how to break down syllables as well as combining syllables. We do not teach or encourage clapping or tapping of syllables as children can’t visualise the syllables by clapping. Syllables are required to be affiliated with something visual that can be related to each syllable.
We teach by repetitively sounding syllables into the children’s hearing system along with visual activities. This provides literacy learning to all children including those who have delayed speech, delayed auditory processing and language learning difficulties.
Story-Bees
(4-6 year old Story & Narrative Telling)
In today’s society, our children are exposed to a lot of technology in their learning, yet their oral language skills may not have been developed to the appropriate level. This class attempts to improve a 4-6 year old’s oral language skills. We work on 5 year old level skills of narrative and telling skills.
We aim to bring a level of language instruction from the use of fairy tales and activities which will allow students to retell what picture they have recreated from the fairy tale they studied in class. We aim for students to retell or recount their activity they have just engaged in and to express it to the class. This will not only improve students’ oral language skills but also build their confidence and self-esteem to speak in public or in front of their classmates.
Crafty-Bunnies
(3-4 year old preparing for handwriting fine motor skills)
Syllable sounding is an important skill which leads to early learning of spelling and reading abilities. We teach syllable sounding through the use of body movement or colour objects or touching objects. It is a fun and engaging strategy to clearly teach how to break down syllables as well as combining syllables. We do not teach or encourage clapping or tapping of syllables as children can’t visualise the syllables by clapping. Syllables are required to be affiliated with something visual that can be related to each syllable.
We teach by repetitively sounding syllables into the children’s hearing system along with visual activities. This provides literacy learning to all children including those who have delayed speech, delayed auditory processing and language learning difficulties.
Wordy-Monkeys
(5-6 year old First 100 Sight Words)
In this class, the material covered consists of common words which are very important for early spelling and writing and reading ability. Most children require a clear, simple and methodical system of teaching of these words. The first part of the program works by using the sounding out principle with regular decodable words. The next part of the program works with a degree of irregularity of words, for example ‘find’, students need to rethink of what is the common word they know and how it is read.
Once students have learnt these sight words, they won’t require the use of these principles any longer. The third part of this program teaches the phonic concepts, especially digraphs. Once these phonic concepts of “th”, “oo” and etc are learnt, those words will become more regular. Highly irregular words require more than just the phonic concept and sounding out principal. Therefore, in this program students are also taught these harder words.
Phonic-Bears
(4-6 year old Alphabet and Early Phonics)
Children learn to sing the alphabet and learn the letter names. The harder component of the alphabet is learning the sounds of the alphabet. This class prepares students to learn the alphabet sounds rather than the alphabet names. They will be in a better position to learn the alphabet sounding of whole words. This class assists students to have the ability to hear, say and think about the beginning sounds in words. Students will learn that, that particular symbol or letter links to that sound that they can hear.
Flash cards are used to extract early phonic concepts. It’s simple and enjoyable activities which also involve motor skilled activities. Students can learn alphabet sound knowledge and phonic concepts at a quick pace. In this class, students learn upper-case and lower-case of each letter, moving their bodies to how the letter is structured and what the mouth looks like when creating these sounds. Our activities include phonic sounds such as sh, ch, th and qu sounds. Students associate learning with movement, the sounds they see made by the mouth and pictures which they associate with sounds and therefore hopefully this will move them into early reading and spelling quickly.
Letter-Pups
(4-6 year old tracing and letter formation)
This program is followed on by Crafty-Bunnies where students have been exposed to motor skills preparation for handwriting. Students are taught to form letters by using large body tracing movements.
We focus on pencil grip, pressure of holding the pencil and posture while writing the letters. After students finish this program, they should be ready for early literacy writing.
