In 2016, we introduced Daily 5 throughout the school. Daily 5 is a literacy framework that has three major benefits:

• It encourages independence
• It creates a classroom of highly engaged readers, writers, and learners
• It provides teachers with time and structure to meet diverse student needs.

Our students participate in activities and receive direct instruction related to reading, comprehension, spelling, vocabulary, writing, grammar and punctuation within the Daily 5 framework. Explicit comprehension lessons take place across every classroom in the school, with a focus on strategies that will develop competent and confident readers. The framework enables our teachers to regularly listen to your child read and conference with them about the strategies they are using to reach their reading goals.

One of the methods we can use to monitor the success of Daily 5 is PAT testing. PAT tests are standardised tests developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). They are used by most schools across Australia to track achievement in key areas such as reading and Maths. At Living Faith, students from Year 1 to Year 6 undertake PAT tests at the beginning and end of every year to ascertain how much each cohort has improved across the year in core learning areas such as Maths and reading, as well as gaining important information about individual students.

Since the implementation of Daily 5, a number of our cohorts have achieved the highest PAT reading results ever recorded at Living Faith. Other results of note are:

• A 32% increase in student improvement in reading during the year
• Our students achieving almost 10% above the national average
• An 8% increase in the number of students who achieved at the year level standard or above
• 84% of students in Year 1 achieving the national average for the past two years (this is a particularly large improvement).

We are thrilled with the improvements in reading we have seen since Daily 5 implementation. According to the school-wide engagement survey completed by our students in 2017, our Junior Primary students now state that reading is their favourite activity at school!

- Rebecca McConnell, Director of Learning and Innovation