Epping North Public School (ENPS) is located in Sydney’s northwest. The Principal, Ms Jo Wilcher, states that ENPS’s literacy achievements are generated through a supportive and committed community that takes a highly active role in the education of their children, a learner centred culture that teaches students to be self-reliant and directed, and explicit literacy teaching. (Wilcher, 2016,. 00:30). These attributes build on the framework created by cohesive and collaborative classroom teachers, which additionally includes a dedicated teacher librarian, a Reading Recovery teacher, an ESL teacher plus learning support teachers, to progress student growth in literacy outcomes (Annual Report, 2015).
MySchool (ACARA, 2017), states that the
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The increasing numbers of students enrolling at the school with LBOTE will increase the need for an explicit and systematic phonological awareness and phonics program, taught simultaneously (Fellows & Oakley, 2014, p. 226). While reciprocal reading technique will allow the teacher to spend more time with struggling readers, the Reading Recovery initiative provides students with strategies using multiple cues to discern errors while simultaneously constructing meaning (Chapman & Tunmer, 2016), and increasing motivation (Bates, D'Agostino, Linda, & Xu, 2016). As research indicates that boys are less motivated to read as compared to girls (Munson-Warnken, 2017), the school librarian must maintain consciousness regarding the higher ratio of girls to boys at ENPS, and ensure the shelves in the library reflects books holding wide appeal to both sexes, rather than gendered and stereotypical ‘boy books’ that sets the sexes as