Widemere+PS

Team Members: Lauren Wilson, Patricia Johnston
 * __Widemere PS __**
 * Project Coordinator/Facilitator: Genevieve Hogg **

Widemere Public School is in South Western Sydney in Greystanes, in the Holroyd area. It has approximately 230 students from various socio economic and cultural backgrounds. We have a professional and dedicated staff of 15 who have a range of teaching experience. We currently have 10 classes which include composites across the grades. We have an active and supportive parent community. This year we have added interactive whiteboards to all classrooms to further develop technology skills with all students. As a school we have committed to a solid literacy block in the morning sessions across K-6. We involve all support staff with literacy groupings and sessions across the school. Our school also runs Reading Recovery to assist those in the junior school. At Widemere P.S., our Literacy committee has worked with staff on developing writing skills across the stages in 2009. Our NAPLAN results have shown improvement in 2009. Our Year 3 students performed above state in nearly all areas of literacy. Our Year 5 students performed around state level in all areas of Literacy. Widemere will be focusing on supporting student growth from Year 3 to Year 5. The 2009 NAPLAN data has shown the need to further improve student performance in reading and in particular the use of comprehension strategies. Comprehension has consistently been identified as an area of need for our students. As a result of this we have identified developing the student’s inferential comprehension skills as a focus target for this year. Through best practice, quality teaching and learning programs will be developed for K-6 reading comprehension. Our project team consists of staff from across the school, enabling us to involve all stages in our project. Our team will be developing strategies for effective and explicit teaching of comprehension skills across K-6. As our school has many composite classes and cross grade groupings we felt a whole school focus would be of the most benefit to the school. We aim to involve aspects of the project with our Best Start programs and our various support programs that run in the school.

Inquiry Question
Can K-6 student inferential comprehension levels improve through the explicit teaching of the 6 comprehension strategies (connecting, visualising, questioning, monitoring, predicting, summarising)?