Early Childhood

Students learn best when they are actively engaged in purposeful learning experiences. At Bradshaw...our practices are guided by age-appropriate pedagogies.  

Teachers use a range of teaching approaches and characteristics of quality teaching in their classroom practice. Teachers are supported to align curriculum, teaching practices and assessment to maximise children's engagement in learning and to enhance outcomes. All Early Childhood classrooms are supported with high quality resources and Classroom Support Staff to assist students and teachers to be successful.

Read Write Inc

Read Write Inc is a whole school phonics program at Bradshaw with all students from Transition through to Year 2 participating regularly in age and level appropriate learning experiences in small groups. Read Write Inc is one of the intervention programs we use to support students in Years 3 – 6 to acquire the literacy foundations.

Children learn to read accurately and fluently with a good understanding of what is read. They learn to form each letter, spell correctly and compose their ideas step by step. Throughout the program, children learn the English alphabetic code; the 150+ graphemes (ch – chief, chef, chemist) that represent the 44 speech sounds. They rapidly learn sounds and the letter or group of letters; they need to represent them in three sets of Speed Sound Lessons.

Simple and enjoyable mnemonics help all children to grasp the letter sound correspondence quickly. This knowledge is taught and consolidated every day. High frequency words that are not phonically regular are taught as "tricky" words and are practiced frequently.

Phonic books are closely matched to children's increasing knowledge of phonic and tricky words so that, they experience plenty of success. Repeated reading of books support their increasingly fluent decoding (the process of translating print into speech by rapidly matching a letter or combination of letters to their sounds and recognizing the patterns that make syllables and words).

To read the parents guide to Read Write Inc click here. 

Age- appropriate pedagogies

Age-appropriate pedagogies is the effective early years teaching approach which we use at Bradshaw. It guides teacher to select and use a range of learning activities which:

• actively engage children in purposeful learning experiences
• enhance learning outcomes
• build a positive outlook towards learning, now and in the future.
• respond to the range of children, cultures, communities, ages and developmental levels, subjects, skills and knowledge

In the classroom you will hear staff and students talk about Discovery Learning. These are learning opportunities which are active, creative, explicit, language rich, playful, responsive, collaborative and scaffolded enabling the student to undertake their own purposeful learning from a point of developmental and personal interest.