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What does PLD recommend when catering for strong spellers and students achieving high scores in subsequent PLD Stages? PLD recommends that teachers avoid accelerating students through the Stages. Instead, we recommend that teachers provide challenging tasks linked to existing concepts. Exploring how words are built and related (word study/morphology) helps strengthen spelling, reading and vocabulary. […]

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While there is no single universally agreed-upon phonics sequence, effective systematic phonics programs share a similar, research-based progression that moves from simple initial code to advanced and complex code. The universal philosophy is to teach the most common, high-frequency letter-sound relationships first, and this enables children to read words quickly. The Standard Systematic Phonics Sequence […]

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Over the past semester, six improvements have been introduced to My SSP Online. Some may already be familiar if you’ve logged in over recent weeks, while others may be new to you. This blog post highlights each of these updates. Upgrade 1: A whole new design The portal has also been reorganised to make navigation […]

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The Year 1 Phonics Check aims to identify students who require targeted literacy support, and schools that require a stronger school-wide approach to structured synthetic phonics (SSP). For schools implementing PLD, a similar screening process has been occurring termly throughout Foundation and into Year 1. The Phonics Check automatically categorises students’ decoding ability into three […]

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As the Science of Reading takes its rightful place in Australian classrooms, many traditional literacy practices are being scrutinised. The “Look, Cover, Say, Write, Check” (LCSWC) method is often at the top of the list for potential removal. Many literacy consultants and school leaders now advise teachers to abandon the technique entirely. They argue it […]

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PLD is designed to align with the Australian Curriculum. Queensland, like all other states and territories, uses the Australian Curriculum as the foundation for its own teaching and learning guidance. This means that a program aligning with the Australian Curriculum will, by design, have strong alignment with Queensland’s requirements too. The Literacy Hub is not […]

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Research into brain activity has shown a bidirectional connection between visual and phonological areas of the brain. This means that children should be systematically taught how letters map to speech sounds and also the speech sounds to print. These skills support each other, creating a reciprocal relationship. Source of the definitions: Jennifer Buckingham (2020),  Five […]

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The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) 8th Edition is a norm-referenced assessment used to assess reading skills from the beginning of schooling through the end of eighth grade. DIBELS is also a criterion-referenced assessment (meaning it measures a student’s performance against a fixed set of predetermined standards or benchmarks.) DIBELS can be […]

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Many literacy organisations recommend between 10 and 20 minutes of reading per day, largely due to the exposure of words this brings to a student. However, citations linked to these recommendations are typically not peer reviewed studies. Most of the existing recommendations seem to be based upon an article from 1988 in which the researchers […]

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What Junior Primary Font Does PLD Recommend?  At PLD we advocate for the use of a foundation font when learning to read, spell and write. Based on our experience across the disciplines of speech pathology, occupational therapy and education, and our research into this area, we believe that the use of a foundation font gives […]

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What is a Structured Synthetic Phonics Approach? A structured synthetic phonics (SSP) approach emphasises the relationship between sounds and their written symbols as being integral to developing reading and writing skills (Jonston & Watson, 2004; Ehri et al., 2001). Three national inquiries (NELP, 2008; Rose 2006; Rowe 2005) consistently support SSP, with a strong code […]