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The Literacy Block in a Structured Literacy Classroom

Juggling the demands of a busy classroom is not for the faint hearted, and ensuring that you are covering all areas of the curriculum adequately is enough to keep even the most experienced teacher up at night!

The ‘Literacy Block’ in this blog refers to the amount of time allocated to the teaching of literacy across a school day. Some teachers prefer to teach literacy as one continuous block of time and others prefer to spread the teaching in smaller chunks across the day. How you manage these logistics are up to your discretion and will depend on the year level of your class, students’ ages and needs.

Your school may organise instructional times differently to what is suggested in this blog, or you may have other constraints and priorities you need to consider when designing your literacy block, therefore take this example as a recommendation and starting point to make it your own.

Overview of Components

Word Reading and Spelling Instruction

  • Phonemic awareness
  • Phonics for reading and spelling
  • Morphological awareness
  • Advanced spelling instruction (Upper Primary)
  • Sentence work (Syntax)
  • Reading fluency

Knowledge Building and Vocabulary

  • Explicit, systematic and incidental teaching of vocabulary
  • Knowledge rich units 

Writing Instruction

  • Explicit handwriting Instruction
  • Sentence and paragraph teaching

Text Level Comprehension and Writing

  • Shared and independent reading, including high quality literature
  • Comprehension strategies
  • Modelled, shared and independent writing
  • Genre-level instruction

Click chart below to download

Fitting it all in

Including all essential components of a robust, evidence informed literacy block into the day can be intimidating and can appear near impossible. This is where you need to be strategic and creative.

  • Consider what can be done effectively as a whole class and what is better in a small group. 
  • Small group instruction can be short and sharp if your review, handwriting, alphabet teaching, some blending and segmenting has been taught as a whole class.
  • Choose fluency passages/texts that reinforce your knowledge rich curriculum (topics/themes you are teaching in other curriculum areas).
  • Write about what you have been reading (if you are learning about sharks in science, read widely about sharks and write about sharks).
  • Choose Tier 2 vocabulary for explicit teaching from read-alouds or knowledge rich texts.

Johnna Alborn

Deputy Principal/Literacy Facilitator

References:

Harnessing the Science of Learning – Nathaniel Swain, Routledge, 2025

The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading – Christopher Such, Corwin, 2021

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