Explicit instruction is central to effective reading teaching and underpins our systematic synthetic phonics approach. This method involves directly showing students what to do and how to do it, recognising that learning is a cumulative, structured process. Mastery of foundational skills is essential before progressing to more complex tasks.
At Currumbin Community Special School, our structured literacy approach explicitly targets the essential components of reading success. Guided by evidence-based frameworks such as the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope, we deliver daily, school-wide phonics instruction each morning. Our phonics program teaches letter-sound correspondences in a sequential manner. As students learn these correspondences, they apply them to decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words, sentences, and passages—building fluency over time.
Instructional routines are important for students because they create a consistent and predictable learning environment that supports engagement, confidence, and cognitive growth. We use established phonics routines so that students know what to expect and how to participate. This predictability reduces the cognitive load on working memory, allowing students to focus more on the content being taught rather than the process of the lesson itself.
Shared and dialogic reading are interactive approaches to reading aloud with children, designed to build vocabulary, comprehension, and oral language skills. At CCSS, students engage in SDR to activate background knowledge, learn topic-specific vocabulary, and develop verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge, and an understanding of language structures.