Special Needs and Support

Lexia

Lexia is an online individualised learning programme.

Lexia provides personalized learning that is both student-driven and teacher-directed.

Using Lexia Reading, students are automatically placed at the proper level and work independently, at school or at home, on developing their foundational reading skills in the student activities. Teachers are provided with a data-driven action plan that tells teachers the specific skills on which each student needs instruction, and prescribes the precise amount of time on the software for each student. This way, teachers can spend their time focused only where it’s needed.

Quick 60 Programme

The Quick60 programme is designed to bring groups of up to five students to expectation in reading and spelling in 60 quick lessons or fewer. Quick60 is a fast and easy-to-administer programme.

The tightly levelled factual books are perfect for classroom or pull-out programmes and are designed for the following:

  • Those for whom there is no other effective early intervention programme available
  • Those who are still not reading at expectation after having other early intervention programmes
  • Those who are struggling with reading because of limited English language.

The Quick60 books will engage even the most reluctant reader.

At Pigeon Mountain Primary school the Quick 60 programme is taken by Mrs. Lowden (Associate Principal and trained reading recovery and SPELD teacher) and Mrs. MacGillivray (One of our very accomplished teacher aides).
To view research information on our Quick60 programme click here:

Quick 60 research information

Spring Maths Programme

Spring into Maths Overview

Focus Group: Students requiring extra support in Number
Identification: Students identified as ‘at-risk’ or ‘cause for concern’ against national numeracy benchmarks
Diagnostic assessment: Completed by classroom teacher

Option 1: IKAN assessment (Knowledge)

Option 2: Spring into Maths Snapshot (Strategy and Number Knowledge),
Mini snapshot of individual student achievement to see if intervention
improves student outcomes.

Intervention Support: Trained parents/teacher aides working with 2 – 3 students
30 minutes: 3 – 4 times a week.  Programme that is ‘over and above’ classroom mathematics learning.

Structure of 30 minutes:
S Start counting
P Patterns
R Reinforcing strategy
I Identifying numbers
N Number facts
G Game

Rainbow Reading

About the Rainbow Reading Programme

The Rainbow Reading Programme is designed to present students with a variety of topics, authors, styles and illustrations to make reading interesting while skills are improved. Each story or article has been carefully selected because of its educational value and attraction to a wide range of students with varying needs and interests.

Books are levelled, colour-coded, and are accompanied by  specially recorded audio available on a magical reading pen, CDs or as MP3 files to provide support and a good model for readers. A comprehensive Teacher’s Manual and Training video ensure that this simple, yet effective programme (which incorporates repeated readings) can be easily implemented (often by Teachers Aides).

Assessment sheets feature the titles of the books presented for teachers to take Running Records to monitor progress. Cloze (Text Completion), Text Sequencing, Word Search, Writing and Dice Game sheets provide meaningful text-related activities.

The Rainbow Reading Programme (and recently New Heights) has been developed, thoroughly researched and trialled by qualified reading specialists in New Zealand. It has been enthusiastically accepted by teachers and students worldwide through distributors in N.Z, Australia, U.K, Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Africa.

The Rainbow Reading Programme is non-threatening, supportive, interesting, enjoyable, economical, easy to implement and effective at improving reading skills. On average, students consistently make gains of 12 months in reading level every 10 weeks of half hour practice, 5 times a week.