At Newborough East Primary School, the English program adheres to the Victorian Curriculum and aims to ensure that students:
- Learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose.
- Appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue.
- Understand how Standard Australian English works in spoken and written forms and in combination with non-linguistic forms of communication to create meaning.
- Develop interest and skills in inquiring into the aesthetic aspects of texts, and develop an informed appreciation of literature.
In classrooms, the school has a strong focus on reading. Each student has an individualised reading program and daily guided reading lessons with a take home reading scheme. Each classroom also has its own library.
Spelling and literacy as a whole are priorities at NEPS. Our school library underwent a face lift in early 2020.
If a learner cannot successfully spell words then they are less likely to succeed at formal learning.
The school uses THRASS as part of its skills and strategies for learning how to spell. Even if a learner is able to spell a word, if they don’t understand the process of why it’s spelled that way, they cannot use this knowledge to spell unfamiliar words.
THRASS is an approach that focuses on students knowing the 44 sounds of English and the various spelling choices that represent these sounds and is featured in every classroom from Grades Prep to 6. It is an expectation that all students learn the features of the THRASS chart.
Parent information sessions about the school’s English curriculum, and THRASS, are held at the start of the year.