Intervention at St Pat's

We have a multi-tiered intervention approach at St Pat's. This is to ensure all students are accessing the curriculum at their level. We are working with Catholic Education to ensure students of all abilities are supported. This includes extending students in small group intervention in Direct Instruction. 

Story Champs - Oral Language Program 

This Term we have introduced the program Story Champs at St Pat's.

Strong academic oral language is critical for bolstering students’ success in school. Most state educational standards (e.g., Common Core State Standards) include objectives for speaking and listening in addition to reading and writing. These language-based skills are highly interrelated and essential for academic success. Students who do not have an adequate oral language foundation have considerable
difficulty meeting academic expectations. Story Champs was developed to systematically and explicitly promote oral language as the foundation to success in school. In Story Champs, academic language is fostered primarily through listening to and producing oral narratives (stories), but informational discourse is also addressed. The organisational structures and complexity of the language used in narratives and informational discourse reflect the sophistication of language that students must read and write in school. Strengthening academic language via oral narratives can facilitate growth in other academic skills such as recalling and sharing information, acquiring word meanings through context, expanding domain knowledge, producing more advanced writing, and comprehending text.

Story Champs is a multi-tiered language intervention curriculum that helps educators and clinicians promote academic language of diverse students. Story Champs
is a semi-manualized program with explicit teaching procedures, but it is also extremely flexible to allow for sensible differentiation. Although the primary focus of Story Champs is on the development of a strong oral language foundation through storytelling, it also promotes other aspects of academic language that are essential for school success through information retelling, vocabulary learning, and writing.