Learning Support at Pallara State School

At Pallara State School learning support is just one of the ways that students are supported to achieve at school. The most important of these is, of course, the classroom teacher. Classroom teachers regularly monitor and adjust their programs to meet the needs of students in their classroom. Teachers monitor the progress of their students and identify areas of concern or patterns that are emerging. If after in-class modifications as student is still experiencing difficulties, the teacher requests further investigation to help determine the cause or nature of the student's learning difficulty.

Classroom teachers and students are supported by a number of in-school personnel and visiting specialists including the Learning Support Teacher, Key Teacher, Guidance Officer, AVT- Inclusion, Speech Pathologist and others.

If you have any concerns or queries about your child's progress at school, your first point of contact is your child's classroom teacher.

Tips for Parents to Support Readers

Here are some tips for parents to help support your developing reader at home.

• The most important tip is that reading should be fun! If your child is anxious or upset about reading to you - read to them instead!
• When your child comes to a word they can not read guide them to try one of the following reading strategies:
  • Sound out the word. Remind them to start with the first sounds, middle and end sounds and then blend the sounds together.
  • Break the word into 'chunks'. For example cat becomes 'c' and 'at'. Remember would become 're' 'mem' 'ber'.
  • Look for the little words hiding in the word. Together for example /to/ /get/ /her/. And is hidden in str/and/. Did you know that there is a nasty monster living in the monastery?
  • Ask them to re-read the sentence slowly.
  • Look at the pictures for clues.
  • If they still can't read the word it is perfectly okay to tell them what the word is. Point to the word as you read it and then ask them to re-read the sentence.

Tips for parents to support developing spellers

There are many ways to learn how to spell new words.  One of these is the Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check method.  To successfully support your child to use this method follow these helpful tips:

LOOK - really look at the word.  Encourage your child to look for interesting letter combinations (ie or ei), little words within the word, double letters. Do they know any words that are like this word in some way?  Ask them to close their eyes and imagine writing the word in bright colours on a blank computer screen.

SAY - make sure your child is pronouncing the word correctly.  (Library not libry.)  Have them slow down how they say the word or say the word in 'chunks' /lam/ /ing/ /ton/ especially if the chunks are spelled the same way they are said.  As they say the word have them listen to the sounds in the word.  Ask them what sounds did you hear first? Last?

COVER - Cover the word and ask your child to close their eyes and visualise the word again.  Challenge them to write it in the air.

WRITE - as they write the word encourage them to remember the LOOK and SAY. 

CHECK - a useful way to check words is to put a tick over every correct letter written in the correct order and circle any mistakes.  Talk about the mistakes and see if your child can identify what 'tricked' them and how they can remember the trick next time.

As you can see, this method is much more than your child just writing out unknown words repeatedly!

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