OCEAN GROVE PRIMARY SCHOOL
Ocean Grove Primary School prides itself on a strong and consistent reading program. We are striving to create a lifelong love of reading in every child. In order to achieve this we follow the Reader’s Workshop model of instruction. This involves a mini lesson, independent reading time, recording their thinking/response in a reader’s journal, guided reading sessions and book clubs. Students at OGPS are encouraged to have choice in the texts that they select to read for independent reading. Each classroom has a fully equipped library of fiction and non-fiction texts.
To complement our reading program we also utilise some online subscriptions to Reading Eggs (Foundation – Year 3) and Literacy Pro (Year 4-6). These are fantastic programs that students access both at school and at home.
Students at OGPS are expected to complete nightly home reading to support and reinforce the reading program at school. Parents are encouraged to have fun with the incidental learning of reading at home and show the everyday usefulness of being able to read fluently.
Ocean Grove Primary builds expert readers!
Ocean Grove Primary School provides a writing program that utilises best practice teaching using the Writer’s Workshop model. Students are exposed to modelled writing from their classroom teacher and explicitly taught the 6+1 Traits of writing in daily writing lessons.
Writer’s Notebooks are used for idea generation and inspiration. Classroom teachers model the collection and development of seeds that can be used to write over a variety of genres. Writing seeds provide students the opportunity for students to write for an authentic purpose and engages them in the writing process. Students are encourage to collect seeds at home to bring into the classroom. The home/school partnership is valued and fostered by bringing writing inspiration to school from their daily lives.
A weekly dictated sentence is an important part of our whole school writing plan. Each year level completes a dictated sentence every week. This dictated sentence helps to develop writing goals for students and reinforces our work on grammar and punctuation.
Spelling is taught explicitly in all classrooms throughout the school week. Ocean Grove Primary School utilises the 307 Oxford Word List words and THRASS to inform our spelling program. As students move through the school they are exposed to Words Their Way spelling program that incorporates spelling rules and generalisations.