At Sunshine Primary School we believe that all students can and will develop their literacy skills. We provide vibrant classrooms that are abundant with student produced work such as published books, posters, signs, all capturing the students learning journey.

We use the Inquiry approach as a springboard to stimulate questions and investigations about the world in which we live. Through the Inquiry approach there are extensive opportunities for all aspects of literacy learning such as speaking and listening, reading and writing.

Our staff have embraced the Western Metropolitan initiatives of the Independent Reading and Writing models. Teachers provide explicit and focussed teaching based on data collected throughout conferences with individual students. Our staff know each student as a readers and writers.

We work with students to set goals and teach appropriate strategies to enable each student to succeed in aspects of literacy. The students are taught the following strategies to assist them to comprehend a text: prediction and prior knowledge, visualising, questions and questioning, text features and structures, think aloud and summarising.

Classroom libraries have been established so students have access to a wide variety of reading material that is ‘just right’ for them.

We are currently developing a ‘Learning Words’ program which assists students to learn words and build upon their vocabulary. There is a strong emphasis on learning words and learning them forever. This includes investigations into letter patterns, prefixes, suffixes and origins of words in the English language.

Language Experience is used extensively in our P – 2 classes with students being actively engaged in real life experiences such as cooking, role plays, design, science experiments and gardening. Experiences are captured using digital software. These are then used to build on the students own language and enhanced language to produce class and individual books for classroom use.

Music and drama are also closely linked to our literacy programs as students sing songs and act out favourite stories.