At Oakwood Primary School, the teaching of Literacy is grounded in a blended pedagogy that evolves to meet the developmental needs of students across different year levels. In the Early Childhood years, the school combines explicit teaching with intentional play-based experiences. This approach ensures foundational literacy skills are taught explicitly while also being reinforced through meaningful, student-led exploration that fosters engagement and creativity. From Years 3 to 6, the Literacy program combines explicit teaching with Inquiry Learning, encouraging students to explore, question, and make connections through guided investigations. This model supports deeper comprehension, critical thinking, and the application of literacy skills in diverse contexts. Across all year levels, explicit teaching remains a core strategy, supported by whole-school approaches that ensure consistency and a shared understanding of effective literacy practices. This alignment guarantees that students experience a coherent and high-quality literacy education throughout their primary schooling.
At Oakwood Primary School, we differentiate our whole-school Literacy approaches to ensure every student’s individual needs are met. In the classroom, this is achieved through targeted one-to-one and small group instruction, allowing teachers to tailor learning experiences based on students’ abilities and goals. Additionally, students who require more intensive support benefit from our structured Literacy intervention program, Multi-Lit, which provides evidence-based strategies to close learning gaps and foster confidence in reading and writing. This personalised approach ensures all learners are supported to reach their full potential.
Cracking the Code
Cracking the Code is a short duration, low intensity program which integrates instruction across a broad range of phonological awareness skills with an emphasis on phonemic awareness. It uses explicit and developmentally appropriate teaching practices. Students are placed in small ability-based groups and complete fun and interactive games focussing on a specific phonological awareness concept.
Heggerty Phonemic Awareness
Developed in 2003 by Dr Michael Heggerty, the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is a systematic program of daily lesson plans that provide a high level of explicit modelling and student engagement. Each level of the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum focuses on six to eight phonemic awareness skills, along with additional activities to develop letter and sound recognition, introduce the phoneme-grapheme connection and extended language awareness. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is also designed to work alongside existing structured synthetic phonics programs and is a great way to build up the phonological skills of our early readers. (DSF, 2025)
UFLI Foundations
UFLI Foundations is a research-based, systematic, and explicit phonics program developed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI). It’s designed for whole-class instruction in early literacy (Pre-primary to Year 2) and can also be used for targeted intervention with older students. The program emphasises the lower strands of Scarborough’s reading rope, focusing on decoding and building foundational reading skills. UFLI provides a scope and sequence, lesson plans, and digital resources, all aimed at helping students develop automaticity and confidence in reading. (UFLI, 2025)
Talk for Writing
Talk for Writing is a unique process that uses spoken activities to develop writing skills. Quality writing is created by first expanding and developing students’ oral language skills then teaching the necessary steps for exceptional sentence, paragraph, and text construction. This is done through three main stages:
Imitation: Students begin by learning a variety of well written text types. They say it out loud together with actions and use story maps to help remember it. Meanwhile, they are learning key grammar skills, vocabulary, sentence and text structure and tools to use in their own writing.
Innovation: Once they know the original text well, students work with the teacher to construct a guided piece. This helps them understand how writing works and gives them a chance to be creative within a safe framework.
Invention: Finally, students use everything they’ve learned to plan and write their own piece of writing independently.
Syntax Project
At Oakwood Primary, grammar and punctuation are taught through an integrated approach combining the Syntax Project and Talk for Writing (Colourful Semantics in Kindy). The Syntax Project provides a structured framework, ensuring that the grammar and punctuation objectives for each year level are delivered through explicit instruction. These objectives are then enhanced by incorporating models from the Talk for Writing texts. The lesson objectives and grammar focuses are presented through a range of pedagogical strategies, including concept development (e.g., examples and non-examples), full participation techniques, and hinge-point questions. Grammar skills are further developed through sentence-level writing exercises that follow the Gradual Release Model, utilizing high-impact instructional methods such as sentence stems, sentence combining, summarizing, and sentence expansion. For deep, lasting learning to take place, it is essential and most effective when Syntax is taught in the context of students’ own writing. At Oakwood, students engage with and analyse the grammar and punctuation tools embedded within the Talk for Writing model texts, and practice applying these concepts through daily sentence- or paragraph-level writing tasks. This approach enables students to apply their grammatical knowledge to innovate on the model text, while also gaining a deeper understanding of how specific grammatical choices influence the reader’s interpretation.
Whole Class Reading
Whole class reading is an instructional approach where the teacher engages the entire class with the same text at the same time, fostering a shared reading experience and exposing all students to rich, high-quality literature. This is implemented as a whole school approach from Kindy to Year 6, ensuring consistency and progression in literacy development across all year levels. Through this method, teachers model effective reading strategies to support language comprehension and develop critical thinking skills. It provides opportunities for explicit vocabulary instruction, helping students access and use new words with confidence. A key feature of whole class reading is the use of a wide variety of text types, including both fiction and non-fiction, carefully selected to connect with curriculum areas across subjects. To ensure equitable access and inclusion, teachers implement a range of full participation tactics to maximise engagement for all learners.
Spelling Mastery
Spelling Mastery is a highly structured, explicit spelling program that is proven to be effective. It uses a direct instruction method, blending phonemic, morphemic, and whole word approaches to teach spelling skills. This approach focuses on teaching students how words are built, how letters represent sounds, and how to recognise patterns in spelling.
