What is Literacy about?

Literacy is about learning to use, create and enjoy the Literacy language in all its forms – oral, written and visual communication.

How is Literacy structured in the New Zealand Curriculum?

Literacy is structured into two interconnected strands:

Making Meaning  |  listening, reading and viewing.

Creating Meaning  |  speaking, writing and presenting.

Students need to practice making meaning and creating meaning at each level of the curriculum.

How is Literacy taught at our school.

• At Kai Iwi School we follow a Structured Literacy approach for the teaching of Reading, Writing, Spelling and Handwriting. This approach is based on over 40 years of world-wide academic research into the Science of Reading. It is an approach in which children are taught systematically and explicitly all important components of literacy. 

• These components include both foundational skills (e.g., decoding, spelling, and letter formation) and higher-level literacy skills (e.g., reading comprehension, written expression). This involves firstly recognising speech sounds, as our brains are designed primarily to process speech. Reading and writing are human inventions, so it is vital we work from speech and then move to print. Tamariki are taught to recognise individual words, syllables, onset sounds, rime and individual sounds in a word.

• We have invested in the Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL) decodable texts, and the Heggerty Phonological Awareness Programme. Little Learners Love Literacy forms the 'backbone' of when the alphabetic code is introduced to our ākonga.