PORTLAND SCHOOL Te Kura o Tikorangi
Literacy - Te Reo Matatini at Portland School Te Kura o Tikorangi
Reading and Spelling - Pānui me Tātaki
At Portland School - Te Kura o Tikorangi we have a structured literacy approach to teaching Reading, Writing and Spelling across our kura since 2022. This approach is grounded in extensive research that shows the most beneficial way for children to become successful readers and writers is with a systematic and evidence-based teaching approach, which is based on the Science of Reading.
As a kura, we have partnered with Learning Matters and use the iDeaL platform to ensure our teachers are well supported with this transition and the approach becomes embedded and sustainable across our school.
Writing - Tuhituhi at Portland School Te Kura o Tikorangi
School Implementation
At the foundation of the Writer's Toolbox system is the composition skills of style, form, and structure alongside extended skills in sentencing, paragraphing, grammar, and composition. Students learn not just the form of the sentence, but its function. Along the way, they master vital stylistic skills and composition principles that have sat silent for over a century.
Writer's Toolbox is a whole-school system. There’s a complete scope and sequence to direct student learning, professional development to build teacher capability, and support for leadership.
Writer’s Toolbox embeds a common language for writing across the whole school—rooted in easy-to-understand terms. The platform talks sentence styles, paragraph types, style, structure, precision—the rules of composition. Established writing skills that support expression across all subject areas.
With the Writer's Toolbox platform to support the explicit teaching of writing structures at Portland School Te Kura o Tikorangi, we use our term Inquiry focus as a provocation to enage our ākonga to write. This also allows our ākonga to put into practice and transfer writing skills to real life mahi.
