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Beyond Phonics: Developing the Full Range of Primary English Skills
When people hear about a systematic phonics program, they naturally think about sounds, letters and learning to read.
Phonics is certainly at the heart of theFitzroy Program. But learning to read is only one part of developing strong English skills.
This is where theFitzroy Word Skills workbooks play an important role.
Designed to work alongside theFitzroy Readers, the Word Skills take the knowledge introduced through each carefully sequenced story and provide opportunities to practise, apply and extend it into a broad range of English skills.
The result is a comprehensive English program encompassing reading, spelling, writing conventions, comprehension, vocabulary, oral language, and informative, narrative and persuasive writing.
Building Skills from the Start
At the beginning of the program, students learn to connect letters to sounds, decode words, spell early high-frequency words, and match simple words to pictures. Even at these early levels, the Word Skills extend into comprehension, rhyming, word games and oral communication.
As students progress, the range of English skills expands. The workbooks reinforce phonics knowledge while also introducing basic writing conventions such as capital letters and full stops for simple sentence construction. Later workbooks introduce parts of speech, tenses and increasingly complex sentence structures. Punctuation develops progressively too, from full stops to commas, question marks, quotation marks and more.
Comprehension: From Decoding to Understanding
The Fitzroy Readers provide the texts that students read. The Word Skills then provide opportunities to do more with those texts.
Students identify vocabulary from the story, answer comprehension questions, sequence events and increasingly write full-sentence responses. Comprehension activities develop precision in reading and written expression.
Because the activities are linked directly to the corresponding Reader, students work with language they have encountered in meaningful text.
Grammar develops alongside reading and writing
One distinctive feature of the Word Skills is the systematic development of grammar, punctuation and writing skills.
At the higher levels, students work with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs; present, past and future tenses; comparative and superlative forms; quotation marks; compound and complex sentences; subjects and objects; prefixes and suffixes; prepositions; active and passive voice; and more.
These concepts are introduced progressively and connected to the language students are already reading and using.
Vocabulary becomes richer and more precise
English is about more than knowing how to spell individual words.
The higher-level Word Skills books explore synonyms, antonyms, homophones, homonyms, word derivations and figurative language. Students learn to recognise relationships between words and how different vocabulary choices can be used for different purposes.
From answering questions to expressing ideas
The Word Skills also provide an expanding writing program.
Students begin with simple sentence composition and progress towards informative writing tasks, narrative stories, character descriptions, rewriting passages from different perspectives and persuasive pieces. Discussion activities develop oral language and give students the opportunity to explore ideas before putting them into writing.
As they work through the Word Skills, students practise writing for different purposes using increasingly sophisticated grammar and vocabulary.
A cumulative English program
The Fitzroy Program is carefully structured so that each stage builds on the knowledge and skills developed earlier. The Fitzroy Readers introduce phonics and language in a carefully controlled sequence, while the Word Skills build on this knowledge through increasingly varied spelling, grammar, comprehension and writing activities.
As students progress through the program, they move from working with letters, sounds and simple words to using increasingly complex language and writing conventions across a range of text types.
The Fitzroy Readers and Word Skillstogether provide a structured pathway through primary English – helping children not only to decode words, but to understand them, spell them, enjoy them, and use them to communicate their own ideas.
Common Questions
1. Is the Fitzroy Program just a phonics program?
No. Phonics provides the foundation, but the program develops a broad range of primary English skills, from reading and spelling through to grammar, comprehension and writing.
2. What year levels does the Fitzroy Program cover?
The Fitzroy Program provides a structured pathway through primary English from Foundation to Year 6, with resources that progress in complexity as students develop.
3. How do the Fitzroy Readers and Word Skills work together?
The Fitzroy Readers provide the texts and reading progression, while the corresponding Word Skills worksheets provide opportunities to develop and practise the full range of primary language and literacy skills.
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