imPACT at Tanilba Bay

imPACT at Tanilba Bay PS

In 2020, Tanilba Bay Public School introduced a new phonics-centred teaching approach.

Our decision to embrace phonics-centred teaching was grounded in a strong research base, including major reviews of the teaching of reading in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

These reviews have consistently identified five key components of effective reading programs: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, 2017).

To optimise student success, each of these components must be taught explicitly, sequentially and systematically. Oral language is the final piece of the literacy learning puzzle, and with the other five key components, forms the BIG 6 of Literacy Learning at Tanilba Bay PS.

Since 2020, K-1 teachers have been developing their own school-specific units of instruction that explicitly teach the BIG 6, while also engaging students in high-impact instruction of writing.

These units incorporate and build on the tools and strategies gathered through our ongoing partnership with The Literacy Collective (TLC) and are the products of teacher-led collaboration. Our unit development project is called imPACT: Phonics at the Centre of Teaching. By 2022, all K-2 classes will engage in phonics-centred teaching, with the practices and resources associated with this method available to teachers throughout the school.

Key features of imPACT include:

auditory training: students learn to discriminate individual sounds in words
‘sound to print’ instruction: students learn sounds first along with different letter combinations that can be used to record that sound
decodable readers: Readers that teach children to ‘sound out’ words
multi-sensory learning activities: smell, touch, taste as well as sight and sound
systematic teaching of writing, with a focus on sentence structure.

A key feature of our program is use of the TLC emojis, which provide a visual prompt (or scaffold) to help students learn to identify different sounds and associate them with letters and letter combinations. Using the emojis helps students of all ability levels to become independent readers and writers.

imPACT places Tanilba Bay at the cutting edge of reading instruction, aligning our teachers’ practice with the new draft NSW English syllabus and the Department of Education’s

More information about quality reading instruction can be found in the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE) review Effective reading instruction in the early years of school, which teachers at Tanilba Bay have been using to guide planning of our rich, multi-sensory units of instruction.