Early Reading at Flitwick Lower Foundation Stage 2017

Principles and practises Early years education takes account of the needs of the whole child: Academic Physical Emotional Spiritual At FLS, we focus on developing a love of learning and an enthusiasm for school as a solid foundation for a child’s future education

Reading at home Parents are a child’s first teachers Reading is a key life skill. Once you can read fluently, the possibilities are endless. Reading at home Parents are a child’s first teachers Nurture reading for enjoyment. Reading for enjoyment will help reinforce skills learned at school. Children need to read books they enjoy…there will still be words they can recognise or decode in a book of their choice. By reading widely and not always at the most basic level children learn new facts and new vocabulary. Reading does not always have to be challenging… Newspapers, magazines, internet, instructions, the back of a cereal packet…Whatever they want to read!

Reading at home Talk together, sharing experiences and ideas and learning to make conversation. Correct their grammar and any mispronunciations. Model the reading process by reading aloud to your child. Share stories and find out facts together. Read books yourself. Play with language through rhymes, poems and songs. Create a word rich environment by having books close to hand. Be interested in the books they bring home from school. Visit the library to find more books by a favourite author or on a favourite topic. Take your child into a book shop and choose a new book together. Read words displayed in the environment.

Phonics Teach early reading skills: Teach early spelling skills: Focussed listening including hearing and making sounds in a range of environments Hearing and saying rhyming words and initial sounds Recognising key words Blending sounds to read simple words Teach early spelling skills: Knowing letter names Recognising the sounds individual letters and groups of letters can make Segmenting sounds to spell Forming letters correctly to write the letters for those sounds

Phonics - How is learning about letters and sounds different to when I was at school? Then 26 letters of the alphabet ABCD 25 sounds, c and k making the same sound. abcd Now Still 26 letters in the alphabet but 44 sounds in the English language

Phonics - Daily Lessons We use real and nonsense words to rehearse the phonemes we’ve learned! Phonics - Daily Lessons Each session lasts about 20 minutes Fast pace Follows phases from the DfE Letters and Sounds curriculum Model Revisit and review previous sounds taught Teach new sound and key words using a range of games & activities including THRASS resources Practise new sound and key words to motivate, reinforce and enhance skills learned Apply & assess

THRASS Teaching Handwriting, Reading And Spelling Strategies Shared vocabulary across the school so that children aren’t confused Multisensory approach Clear annunciation, using pure sounds Using names of letter to talk about the sounds they can make

Phonics - Getting started For phonics think sounds Letters are used to represent different sounds Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a word Graphemes are the marks we make to represent a phoneme. They can be 1, 2 3 or 4 letters from the alphabet in a block.

Phonics - Specific vocabulary Identify blocks of letters that make sounds graph (1 letter that makes 1 sounds, e.g. ‘b’ as in ‘bird’) digraph (2 letters that make 1 sound, e.g. ‘sh’ as in ‘shark’) Split digraph (2 letters that make 1 sound not adjacent, e.g. cake) trigraph (3 letters that make 1 sound, e.g. ‘igh’ as in ‘light’) quadgraph (4 letters that make 1 sound, e.g. ‘eigh’ as in ‘neighbour’ Blocks of letters can be consonant phonemes or vowel phonemes.

Phonics – key words Key words are words which are not yet phonetically decodable. Children learn to read and spell them correctly with plenty of practise, using the ‘see and say’ flashcard technique to become part of their sight vocabulary. Phase 2 key words: I, no, go, to, the, into

Phonics – supporting us at home Sing lots of nursery rhymes Have a THRASS chart at home to play games with Make up silly stories to develop vocabulary, imagination and story structure Use clear pronunciation when talking about sounds letters make Use the letter names from the alphabet when reading and writing Write with lower case letters, and capitals when appropriate, forming letters correctly

Phonics – supporting us at home Remember that a letter in the alphabet (grapheme) can make a variety of sounds, e.g, ‘g’ as in ‘gate’ and ‘g’ as in ‘giant’ Encourage your child to recognise some phonemes and graphemes as you read to them Help them develop their sight vocabulary by asking them to find key words in a text Encourage them to apply their phonics skills to unknown words (sound out new words) Look for blocks of letters making phonemes and try to match them on the THRASS chart, e.g. ‘ck’ as in ‘duck’ Remember that phonemes in words can be spelled in different ways, e.g. ‘f’ as in ‘fish’, ‘ff’ as in ‘coffee’ and ‘ph’ as in ‘dolphin’

Phonics – supporting us at home Remember phonics is not the only reading and spelling strategy Use the pictures to talk about the story Reread sentences to make sure they make grammatical sense and are contextually relevant Look for word families to help read and spell an increasing number of words, e.g. cat, sat, mat, flat, spat e.g. clap, club, clam, clip Check the words look right when spelling

Phonics – sound buttons, key words, THRASS words & phonemes Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. f e tch p ai l

Phonics – let’s have a go... How many sounds? ‘Cup’ has 3 graphemes/letters (c, u, and p) and 3 phonemes/sounds (‘c’ as in ‘cat’, ‘u’ as in ‘bus’ and ‘p’ as in ‘panda’) pig swim cartwheel ot vep osk tree queen frog ect plang kulp care foot blue