Literate Learners for Life
Every student. Every Subject. Every Year.
Learning to read is an essential skill to not only find success in school and thrive in society, but to also experience the joy that reading brings to life.
Catholic Education Tasmania’s Literate Learners for Life initiative will focus on improving literacy for every student, in every subject, every year.
We want every child to be successful in reading!
Creating better outcomes for Tasmania’s young people
With general literacy levels sitting just below 50% for working age Tasmanians, we need to act to create better outcomes for our young people. The research is telling us that while reading is more challenging for some students than others, with evidence-based reading instruction nearly every child can become a proficient reader.
Literacy impacts on each person’s success in their life, work, health and well-being.
As every learning area in the curriculum has specific literacy requirements, all our teachers are being supported in their approach to literacy. Literacy Leaders have been appointed in each of our 38 schools across Tasmania to work with our teachers to further develop their understanding of the science of reading.
Building strong learning foundations
Commencing in 2022, the Literate Learners for Life initiative started with a roll out of InitiaLit; a literacy program for Prep to Year 2 students. InitiaLit provides an evidence-based, whole-class literacy program designed to support the work schools have already been doing to build strong foundations for students in their early school life. Developing these foundations provides students with the knowledge they need to become successful readers and writers.
The science of reading
The research that we’re learning about and implementing is called the Science of Reading. This is about understanding how the brain learns to read and teaching our students to read according to what they need. We now know more about how the brain develops as we learn to read and what instructional practices are most effective for all children.
For example, did you know there are 44 speech sounds in English and hundreds of ways to spell them?
The first phase of the Literate Learners for Life program will focus on supporting Prep to Year 2 students to develop the skills to ‘crack the code’ of our alphabet and link them to the speech sounds in the English language.
Part of this work involves helping our students to learn to decode/sound-out words before they can understand the meaning of text. ‘Cracking the code’ is a necessary skill for students to develop before they move on to more complex literacy skills.
Our goal is to continue to help our students build their knowledge and develop their skills to become Literate Learners for Life!
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