At Thomastown Meadows Primary School, English is taught in an environment rich in knowledge, language, and meaningful texts. Through the English curriculum, our focus is to develop students’ speaking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking skills.

As literacy forms an essential foundation for all learning, we place a strong emphasis in the early years on explicit, systematic instruction in core literacy skills. These include word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting, sentence level writing, and academic talk. As students progress through the year levels, they apply, develop, and extend these essential skills in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Reading

Foundation – Year 2

Students participate in InitiaLit, an evidence-based literacy program that supports the development of strong foundations in reading, spelling, and writing. This explicit, sequential, and research-informed approach builds phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, oral language, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Years 3 – 6

Students engage in novel studies aligned with the Victorian Curriculum, providing opportunities to explore rich, diverse, and high-quality texts. This approach deepens comprehension, vocabulary development, critical thinking, and appreciation of literature.

Writing

Writing is taught systematically, beginning at sentence level and progressing to extended composition. Students learn to craft authentic, meaningful texts intended for real audiences, supported by explicit teaching, worked examples, and guided practice.

Across the year levels, students learn to identify and use the features of a range of genres, including narrative, informative, and persuasive texts. Through our comprehensive writing programs, students develop an understanding of text organisation and structure, language features, authorial purpose and voice, sentence construction, and the conventions of writing, such as grammar and punctuation.

Support Programs

Additional support is available for students requiring assistance with literacy, including:

• Small Group Intervention
• Language Support Program
• English as an Additional Language (EAL) support
• Differentiated classroom learning