Through hearing stories, children and young people are exposed to a rich and wide vocabulary. This helps students improve their own vocabulary and understanding, which is important to their understanding of the world around them.

At Isebrook, our library has a range of fiction and non-fiction books and magazines. Students have a great deal of input as to what goes into our collection, and so we have a vast range of topics and subjects available.

Isebrook uses a variety of approaches to facilitate the teaching and learning of reading:

• Phonics Approach:
  • The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns.
• Multi-Sensory Approach:
  • This uses all possible senses in the approach to reading. Students may use finger tracing (building muscle memory), listening and looking skills to explore letters and words. The Multi-Sensory approach uses visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile methods to enable the students to sense what they are reading with more than their eyes.
• Language Experience:
  • This approach uses the student’s existing oral skills to help them experience reading. This method also uses a student’s oral language as a basis for spelling instruction.
• Reading Comprehension support:
  • It is vital to ensure that a student understands what it is they have just read. We teach students the strategies and techniques for studying text and acquiring meaning.

The above approaches are delivered and reinforced by class teachers and support staff across the curriculum and secured by the Literacy Team, who provide extra support and interventions on a 1:1 or small group basis where needed.