LITERACY READING

By the end of the Reception Year children are expected to reach 17 Early Learning Goals. The Early Learning Goal for Reading: Children read and understand simple sentences. They use phonic knowledge to decode regular words and read them aloud accurately. They also read some common irregular words. They demonstrate understanding when talking with others about what they have read.

Currently your child is expected to be working within the months+ age related progress of Early Learning Outcomes (The guidance we use to make assessments and judgements of children's attainment in the different areas of the curriculum). They should be doing or showing signs of knowing some of the following: Continue a rhyming string Hear and say initial sounds in words Can segment the sounds in simple words and blend them together and know which letters represent some of them Links sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet Beginning to read words and simple sentences Use vocabulary and forms of speech that are increasingly influenced by their experiences of books Enjoy and increasing range of books Know that information can be retrieved from books and computers.

All children are unique and can have very different starting points. We take this on board and plan our teaching and learning accordingly. One of our main aims in Reception and in Nursery is to develop children's interest in books and enjoyment of reading.

Throughout Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One a big focus is placed on phonics and using this as an aid to reading. We teach phonics through a program known as ‘Letters and Sounds’ Each day your child will take part in a 20 minute letters and sounds session which focuses on developing recognition of phonemes (the sound that letters make), graphemes (the written form of sounds, this may be 1 letter e.g. s, f, x or 2 or more letters as in sh, ng or igh), blending sounds to develop reading skills and segmenting sounds to help spell words for writing. Each sessions consists of 4 parts – Revision, Teaching, Practise and Applying. It is a very fast program and children will be learning a minimum of 4 phonemes/graphemes a week. These along with words will be sent home for you to help your child practise. Some of the words will be decodable words using the sounds we have been focusing on e.g. at, is and it and some will be what we call tricky words e.g. the, to, no, he, she, me etc.

By The end of the year it is expected that Reception children are able to recognise 46+ phonemes and recall 75+ words by sight or blending. When teaching your children new phonemes (s, a, t ), vowel digraphs (ee, oo, oo, ai), trigraphs (igh, air) there is a specific way to pronounce them and it is important that you say them the same at home e.g. s is not suh it’s sssss and x is not x it’s ksss.

Things your child might come home and say: Sound Talk / Robot voice - c a t Sound Buttons - c a t... Blend Segment Phoneme, Vowel Digraph, Trigraph

Children need to hear sounds in words first and it is important that your child picks this up quickly. To help with this you and can ‘sound talk’ words at home e.g. Go and get your c oa t please.... There is an extremely big focus on blending sounds to read and this is an essential skill BUT children must also learn to read words purely by sight so that their reading flows. It is extremely important that the flash cards sent home once decoded by blending are still practised so that they can also read them by sight. We also encourage children to use pictures as cue to reading and get them to think about if what they have read makes sense and if not go back and re-read it. Children also need to continue to talk about the illustrations and about the story.

By the end of Reception children are expected to be reading sentences in books such as :- We ask if possible for you to listen to your child read each night. Year on year we see some children really take off with their reading and go beyond what is expected of them. It is usually the children who read regularly at home. Those that don’t make the expected progress are often the children who do not read much at home or whose parents aren’t on board with this partnership in learning.