Sounds Write

Sounds Write

Our school implements the Sounds-Write program as part of a balanced Literacy Program. Sounds-Write involves daily explicit teaching and practice in phonological awareness and phonic knowledge skills and understandings.

Sounds Write is effective in teaching pupils to read, spell and write, because it starts from what all children know from a very early age - the sounds of their own language. From there, it takes them in carefully sequenced, incremental steps and teaches them how each of the 44 or so sounds in the English language can be spelt. The words used in the teaching process and the conceptual knowledge of how the alphabet code works are introduced from simple to complex, in accordance with the fundamental principles of psychological learning theory.

Sounds Write provides opportunities for practising skills on a daily basis until pupils achieve the automaticity required for fluent reading and spelling.

Sounds-Write is the phonics program used across Prep, Grade 1 and Grade 2 at Moriac PS. It is a linguistic phonics program which takes a 'speech to print' approach. That is, students first learn to carefully identify and hear the sounds they speak, before learning which letter/letters represent them in written words.

Students apply the knowledge they learn during explicitly taught Sounds-Write sessions when reading decodable readers both at school and at home, and when writing short sentences and texts.

Home Reading

Students take home one decodable reader and one ‘sound review’ sheet per week. The decodable reader and ‘sound review’ sheet are reviewing the content that has been taught in the previous fortnight. This is so students are engaging in retrieval practice when reading at home, which provides them with additional opportunities to consolidate their new learning to their long-term memory. The act of retrieving previously learnt information, and attending to it in their working memory, strengthens learning being embedded into long-term memory, so that it can be effortlessly retrieved and used in the future.

Students at Moriac PS also have access to a “Decodable Readers Australia” account. This is another resource that can be used at home to support students with their reading. Your child’s teacher will unlock the relevant level of texts for your child, based on the code knowledge they know and are working on at school.