Equitable Literacy at Sauchie ELC

The key focus of this practice example was to utilise the Sue Ellis Training and continue to encourage a ‘love of books, language and literacy amongst our children at Sauchie ELC’. We implemented 15 core texts to support development of comprehension skills for all our children from 2 years old to 5 years old. These texts are presented in a way to ensure that all children have opportunity to engage, develop and increase language and literacy skills further.

At Sauchie ELC we also have our Diamond award for the LIFT (Language is fun together) project and our skilled educators have managed to work alongside the Childhood Pedagogue to incorporate ideas from the LIFT project into the development of the 15 core texts and comprehension development which all children can access. This ensures children at all ages can engage with development of their language and literacy skills further.

We evidence children’s involvement and progression of these skills through our e-journals and link to literacy progression pathways from the Curriculum for Excellence. This documentation and evidence also helps us to complete Teacher Professional Judgement records which we can pass on to children’s schools during nursery to school transitions and allow us to share if we feel children are on track to achieve early level literacy at the end of P1 or not which is useful information for teachers.

For children in Sauchie ELC who are engaging well with the learning opportunities to develop language and literacy skills for all children and have scored high in the LIFT project assessments, they are part of that Sauchie ELC Literacy challenge group. These are learning opportunities that are facilitated by an educator which are based on phase 2 of the progression pathways for literacy. The aim of these learning experiences is to challenge children’s literacy skills further and to stimulate them to enjoy learning which challenges their current skills and thinking. Children’s engagement with this is again recorded using our e-journals against the progression pathways and we also utilise Leuven's scale of well-being and involvement to ensure that the challenges set are appropriate for each child.

All of this has enhanced Educator knowledge and depth of learning when focussing on comprehension, words and vocabulary in text. Our educators are now skilled in understanding the importance of reading stories and diving deeper into text to explore language and literacy skills. We are also confident in sharing that children in Sauchie ELC have tracked progression of their engagement with this learning at Sauchie ELC which evidences progression of these important skills.