Literacy News
November 2010
Parents and Guardians
Do you know about the exciting dynamic projects for teaching English in our school?
All children get involved from Junior to Senior level and while the children are learning from their special work programme, they are having lots of fun, and progressing to high literacy levels.
At Infant level there’s “Early Intervention” where children are taught in very small groups, so that all our young students receive the individual attention needed at the start of their journey through the education system.
Junior Infants, Senior Infants and 1st Class are all involved in a special phonics programme called “Jolly Phonics” proven to be a fantastic aid for the teaching of reading and writing throughout Ireland and England. Our teachers implementing this programme have received training from the author of “Jolly Phonics” when she came to Ireland.
2nd Class are involved in a phonics programme designed for older children. It’s new in Ireland and our Inspector was delighted with the lesson he saw modelled by our 2nd Class teacher. From checking student records he found the programme very beneficial.
For 4th Class timetables are coordinated by the intervention team, so that like the Infants intensive learning takes place with one teacher per small group.
High achievers are also catered for, where children in 1st and 6th with above average ability are taken by our resource teacher to be challenged at their own academic level.
“Literacy Boost” takes place in senior classes where an intervention team of four teachers arrive at the door of the class teacher to take their own group of 5 students that have been grouped by assessment and tests. Their progress is tracked by testing before and after “Literacy Boost”. These 50 minute sessions are in place since September, and may continue until the end of the school year.
Daily English language classes take place for children whose first language is not English. Oral language, grammar and written English are all included. Two years of this instruction is available to the qualifying students.
Finally, our school has purchased a whopping 2,600 levelled readers specifically chosen to enhance literacy levels and used by teachers in the various intervention programmes operating in Ennis ETNS.