Learning Support at St Mary’s

Learning Support at St Mary’s School seeks to address the individual child’s needs. Support is aimed at children who require specific intervention. And that intervention is designed to improve the participation and learning outcomes of students.

The aim of these programmes is to provide support to classroom teachers and students throughout the school and this is done in the form of developing specific programmes for individual students, at their own developmental level, which enhances their learning. It may also involve extra personnel working with individual students or groups of students.

St Mary’s School has the following Learning Support programmes in place: MiniLit, MacqLit and Extension.

MiniLit

MiniLit is an evidence-based, explicit and effective early literacy intervention program for teaching reading skills to children who are in the bottom 25% of the expected range for their age group in Year 1 or 2. MiniLit is a Tier 2 small group program (up to four students per group) within a Response to Intervention framework, but it can also be used on a one-to-one basis.

MacqLit

MacqLit is an explicit reading intervention program for small groups of students who require additional literacy support. It provides lessons that include all the key components necessary for effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Extension

An extension programme is provided for students in Year Three to Six.  In the programme students have the opportunity to work individually or collaboratively to complete open ended and problem solving tasks.