At Tinternvale Primary School, we focus on developing our students' reading, writing, speaking and listening skills through the English curriculum. As literacy forms an essential foundation for all learning, we place a strong focus in the early years on explicit, systematic instruction in core literacy skills. These include word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting, sentence-level writing and academic talk. As student/>>ts progress through the year levels, they apply, develop and build on these essential skills in increasingly sophisticated ways.

At TPS, our weekly literacy program incorporates the seven fundamental components of literacy:

• Phonemic Awareness - the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words.
• Phonics - the understanding that letters represent the speech sounds of our language.
• Vocabulary – the knowledge of words and their meanings in context that we must know to communicate effectively.
• Fluency - the ability to read text accurately, quickly and with appropriate expression.
• Comprehension – the ability to make meaning from texts through literal, inferential and critical understanding.
• Grammar – the ability to understand the constructs of the English language, including morphology, syntax and punctuation.
• Oral Language – the ability to use words and sounds to communicate meaning.

Tinternvale Primary School practises a consistent approach to all areas of literacy using our agreed Instructional Model. Students engage in approximately 10 hours of English instruction each week. Instruction focuses on developing essential literacy skills, knowledge of reading and writing, knowledge for reading and writing, and developing a love of learning, language and literature.