Australian curriculum

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Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recoded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I’m Jocelyn and I want to say a huge hello to all teachers and leaders grappling with assessment and reporting. Last episode of the podcast, I shared a perspective on reporting and grading early years reading without a benchmark assessment. In the old days, we assessed students, looked at the level and then used that to determine what A-E grade students r…

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Hi there, I'm Jocelyn and I'd like to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded here on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania.

Here in Australia, it is Term 4 and the end of the school year is just a few weeks away. That means that teachers and leaders will be turning their attention to assessment and grading in preparation for report writing. So in this episode, I’d like to share some thoughts and suggestions on grading early …

The new Australian Curriculum is out and there is some exciting news.  The words ‘predictable texts’ and ‘combining contextual, semantic, grammatical and phonic knowledge’ are now gone.  Other worrisome phrases such as ‘visual memory’ have disappeared from the year 1 descriptors that relate to reading and writing high-frequency words.  These changes reflect the growing understanding of how we learn to read and are to be celebrated.  No longer will we have to try and counter arguments in favour o…

One of the ‘hot topics’ right now is how to grade reading when we are moving towards a more evidence informed method of assessment.   In a previous post, I wrote about how you might conduct that assessment (here) but the next natural question is, “How does this align with the Australian Curriculum from which we have to grade?”

I warn you, this post is a monster, but I wanted you to have some solid, simple information from which you could make a judgement about reading grades.

The first thing t…