Teacher Shidah Spensberger von Wiorogorski with her group at Mother Teresa Early Learning Centre at Harrison. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
A new early literacy program for preschoolers is filling a learning gap where English is not the dominant language in a household, busy lifestyles cut into story time, families don’t have the resources to have many books, and even where the use of digital devices may have reduced conversation and exposure to books.
School ReadY aims to help preschoolers learn new words, understand how they sound and what they mean through storytelling and play.
Canberra’s nine Catholic early learning centres have begun using the School ReadY program developed by Y WA (Western Australia), which is designed to prepare children for when they start primary school and learn to read and write.
Y WA CEO Dr Tim McDonald said the Y saw a need in its early learning centres for books and language development not only for the children, but also for the staff.
Dr McDonald said the two years before school were crucial to successful learning and the program was about providing the building blocks to reading.
“We don’t teach reading to three, four, and five-year-olds,” he explained.
“We are teaching pre-literacy, which is language and the vocabulary, and we do that through play and we do that through stories.
“We immerse them in beautiful stories and language, but we also teach them intentionally.
“It is an intervention to teach them the sounds of letters and words and how they join together to make these words come alive so that when they get to formal schooling and they learn how to read, they’ve got the building blocks and it gives them the head start to understand, to decode and read books and text.”
While family storytime has long been stressed as a good precursor to reading success, Dr McDonald said it was only an assumption that it was happening.
He said the program was about equal opportunity so every child had the best chance at learning no matter their background.
Mother Teresa School at Harrison started the program in its ELC a couple of weeks ago after ACT educators trained in the program early in the year.
ELC director Amy Slaven said it consisted of a teacher reading an appropriate picture book to the group, asking them questions about what they are hearing, new words and what they mean, and then later discussing what happened or using play to process what they have heard.
“They will assist the children in how to identify words that are new, that they haven’t come across before and provide opportunity to discuss what that means, talk about what’s happening in the story, who their favourite characters are, and all of that builds knowledge of literature, knowledge of reading, oral discussion and phonemic awareness,” she said.
Things such as alliteration and rhyme help build their understanding, while an example of play was the children playing with musical instruments to learn about loud and soft sounds.
CEGC general manager of early learning Leah Taylor and the director of the Mother Teresa ELC at Harrison, Amy Slaven.
General manager of the Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn early learning centres Leah Taylor said for many children, English was a second language.
“We can support those students in developing their English oral language, which is really important for them going through into school so they can start basically at the same level as their peers who have English at home,” she said.
However, not every child was necessarily being read to at home, and some did not even have many books at home.
“We have a whole range of children from varying socioeconomic levels, but also parents who have varying levels of literacy and so it really just helps every child to move on to that same level, so that there’s an equal playing field,” she said.
Dr McDonald said the beauty of School ReadY was that it provided a set, scripted program for teachers that had been professionally written and road tested.
“Everything is validated, research, evidence-based and now our educators are going, this is fantastic,” he said.
“They love it because it’s all planned for them.”
The Y is partnering with La Trobe University, which will monitor the program and evaluate its impact on children’s learning.
Ms Slaven said that so far the feedback from children and parents had been positive, and the school had set up a communal library for families to take home a book for the night to build that reading culture.
Canberra ELCs will contribute to La Trobe’s follow-up research, using the OxEd Language Screen tool to assess the children’s oral language skills.
Dr McDonald said School ReadY was already producing positive results in Western Australia in key areas targeted by the program, such as letter name and sound identification, semantic knowledge and comprehension.
School ReadY was developed by the Y WA in 2022 and the program has been running across all 14 of the Y WA ELCs since May 2024.
It is not a licensed product and schools only have to pay for the training and materials.
