-
Sustained Teaching of Reading is Vital Everyday!
-
Wanneroo PS students access the Literacy Pro computer program. This is an innovative computer-based resource that motivates, encourages and monitors independent reading.
All students do an initial test, after which they are placed on the Literacy Pro Lexile Framework. A Lexile is a unit that measures the amount of challenge presented by a passage of text. If we know the Lexile measure of a book and we know the Lexile measure of a child, we can tell how the book matches the child's reading ability—whether it's too easy, too difficult or ‘just right’.
The Lexile Framework® determines the difficulty of text by way of sophisticated software. The software uses a mathematical equation that looks at two factors:
- The difficulty of the vocabulary (semantic difficulty)
- The complexity of the sentences (syntactic complexity) throughout the entire book.
-
This ensures students understanding (comprehension) is challenged at the various levels, not just their word knowledge. These Lexile levels are colour coded to make the choosing of appropriate reading choices easier for students. The huge database of almost 7000 constantly updated texts (consisting of real books from major children's publishers) motivates children to challenge themselves in their reading.
All students at Wanneroo PS are expected to read nightly from one of these books and when finished take a computer based quiz at school. Students are encouraged to aim high and to set a goal of reading 1 000 000 words in a year!
The school library will be open to students to take quizzes before and after school each day. As well, students can take quizzes in the classroom from 8:30 – 8:45 am on class laptops.
Students are acknowledged at the fortnightly assemblies when they achieve certain milestones.