For students aged 5.5 to 7.5
The Early Literacy Foundations ELF Support Program is an early literacy intervention aimed at students in their first two years of formal schooling. Students who experience difficulties in the areas of listening, reading or spelling also tend to struggle with motor, sensory and perceptual skills (e.g. Dewy, Kaplan, Crawford & Wilson, 2002). This led to the development of an interdisciplinary intervention approach which focuses on two key areas:
- Phonological awareness and its application in reading and spelling.
- Motor and sensory skills necessary for maintaining attention, sitting upright, and handwriting.
The program has a set of screening tasks to assist teachers to detect struggling students at a very early stage in order to provide timely and specific assistance. The intervention consists of 12 weekly sessions for groups of up to 6 students. Each session may run for 1 - 1.5 hours and may be split into two sessions within the one week.
See the ELF Implementation Flowchart for an example of how many schools incorporate the ELF into their literacy curriculum.
Review:
I am a learning support teacher…. We used the ELF program to screen all of our Year 2 students at the beginning of this year … This program with solid classroom teaching has achieved amazing results. The use of body movements with explicit teaching of sounds and blending and gross motor work has been loved and appreciated by the students and myself. We have been blown away by this program’s results!- Natalie Arnel (Learning Support Teacher)