Making a great start to literacy In the Early Years

What we want our children to learn and experience at St Mary’s: To be effective, confident communicators (listeners and talkers as well as readers and writers) To have a love of books and reading for pleasure and for information and learning To be able to write to communicate and to express ideas and feelings and capture experiences, as well as writing for a variety of purposes.

A ‘literacy-rich’ curriculum from the earliest stages. Lots of….. talking and listening (all sorts of sounds). Playing with sounds: games, rhymes, music. Role play, communicating with each other...first-hand experiences (indoors and outdoors) to talk about and describe, to expand thinking and vocabulary...books and stories (exploring them, having fun with them, enjoying the pictures, becoming really familiar with the structure and language)..noticing print (print means something and has a purpose)..making marks in all sorts of contexts, and developing the physical skills that are important for writing. This continues right the way through the early years and beyond.

The Early Learning Goals for Communication and Language Listening and attention: children listen attentively in a range of situations. They listen to stories, accurately anticipating key events and respond to what they hear with relevant comments, questions or actions. They give their attention to what others say and respond appropriately, while engaged in another activity Understanding: children follow instructions involving several ideas or actions. They answer ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about their experiences and in response to stories or events. Speaking: children express themselves effectively, showing awareness of listeners’ needs. They use past, present and future forms accurately when talking about events that have happened or are to happen in the future. They develop their own narratives and explanations by connecting ideas or events. The Early Learning Goal for Reading 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. The Early Learning Goal for Writing Writing: children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.

Spaces where children can communicate with each other The importance of physical development for writing

A wide range of activities help to develop grip and fine motor control

Mark-making in role play

Some examples of early mark-making and emerging writing

Lots of real, first-hand experiences to talk about and to help develop vocabulary

Sharing and getting really familiar with stories and ‘story language’

Early reading: opportunities are everywhere! (Developing children’s awareness that print carries meaning)

The importance of music, songs and rhymes

These are the main ways in which we teach literacy skills in Reception: Phonics (whole class and follow up activities) Shared reading and writing Guided reading and writing Sharing books and telling stories Visiting the school library and taking books home Singing songs and making music Speaking and listening activities Writing and reading opportunities throughout the environment

Phonics Daily whole class phonics sessions lasting minutes We follow the Letters and Sounds programme. s/system/uploads/attachment_data/fil e/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_- _DFES pdf

Follow up phonics activities Children are provided with carefully planned opportunities to read and write using the knowledge they have of letter sounds in the course of their independent play and learning.

Guided Reading This is when a teacher works with a small group of children on a reading activity – often reading a book or playing a game. Each group reads twice a week with an adult. Regular guided reading starts during the Autumn term, once children have established a repertoire of phonic knowledge which they can use to begin to blend, decode and recognise words.

Letters and Sounds Phase 1 General sound discrimination: environmental sounds; instrumental sounds; body percussion Rhythm and rhyme Alliteration Voice sounds Oral blending and segmenting Phase 1 precedes, but also continues alongside, Phase 2 and beyond.

Letters and Sounds. Phase 2 Letter progression Set 1: s a t p Set 2: i n m d Set 3: g o c k Set 4: ck e u r Set 5: h b f, ff l, ll ss A phoneme is a single unit of sound. A grapheme is the way we represent it in writing. The purpose of phase 2: to teach 19 phonemes, and move children on from oral blending and segmentation to blending and segmenting letters for reading and writing. The ‘schwa’: what it is and how we don’t use it!

By the end of phase 2 many children should be able to read VC and CVC words and to spell them either using magnetic letters or by writing the letters on paper or on whiteboards. We teach the children to blend phonemes to read, and segment phonemes to write. For example: it, as, up cat, peg, top. During the phase they will be introduced to reading two-syllable words and simple captions. They will also learn to read some high-frequency ‘tricky’ words: the, to, go, no. These words are tricky because they are not decodable so cannot be sounded out. Through interesting and exciting games and activities children develop and practise their skills of hearing initial, middle and end phonemes in words. These skills are then applied for reading and writing for different purposes. We will discuss reading and writing in more detail later on.

Phase 3 Letters Set 6: j v w x Set 7: y z, zz qu ch chip ar farm sh shop or for th thin/then ur hurt ng ring ow cow ai rain oi coin ee feet ear dear igh night air fair oa boat ure sure oo boot/look er corner

The purpose of this phase is to teach another 25 graphemes, most of them comprising two letters (e.g. oa). This is called a digraph. For example: boat, chip, feet The children can represent each of the 42 phonemes by one grapheme (how it is written). Children also continue to practise CVC blending and segmentation in this phase and will apply their knowledge of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling simple two-syllable words and captions. They will learn letter names during this phase, learn to read some more tricky words and also begin to learn to spell some of these words. The teaching materials in this phase suggests an order for teaching letters and provides a selection of suitable words made up of the letters as they are learned and captions and sentences made up of the words. They are for using in the activities – practising blending for reading and segmenting for spelling. It must always be remembered that phonics is the step up to word recognition. Automatic reading of all words decodable and tricky – is the ultimate goal.

Phase 4 The purpose of this phase is to consolidate children’s knowledge of graphemes they need to use to represent the phonemes they can hear. We begin to look at difficult words that contain more complex phonemes in the middle that are harder to hear. The teaching materials in this phase provide a selection of suitable words containing adjacent consonants. These words are for using in the activities to consolidate children’s skills of blending for reading and segmenting for spelling. Teach spelling and reading the tricky words he, she, we, me, be, said, so, no, go, I, to, the. During phase 4 we focus very much on word and sentence building. The complexity of the words we practise decoding and blending increases and the skills of hearing those subtle middle are developed as well as the important features of a sentence that we need to use in our writing.

Phase 5 The purpose of this phase is for children to broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling. They will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these and graphemes they already know, where relevant. Some of the alternatives will already have been encountered in the high-frequency words that have been taught. Children become quicker at recognising graphemes of more than one letter in words and at blending the phonemes they represent. When spelling words they will learn to choose the appropriate graphemes to represent phonemes and begin to build word-specific knowledge of the spellings of words.

New graphemes for reading ay day oy boy wh when ou out ir girl ph photo ie tie ue blue ew new ea eat aw saw oe toe au Paul split digraphs- a-e make, u-e rule, o-e home, i-e like, e-e these. The children are exposed the different graphemes available for them to apply in their writing when hearing each phoneme. For example when sounding out the word “balloon” the children will identify the “oo” phoneme and choose from one of the graphemes they have learnt- oo, ew, ue, u_e and include it in their writing. This is a very experimental phase, and connections will be made between their reading and the choices they make in their writing. It is very important that the reading and writing are given the opportunity to work along side each other.

We then move on to exploring different pronunciations of the same grapheme i- fin, find ow- cow, blow y-yes, by, very o- hot, cold ie-tie, field ch- chin, school, chef c -cat, cent ea- eat, bread ou- out, shoulder, could, you g- got, giant er- farmer, her u- but, put a- hat, what

Phase 6 By the beginning of Phase Six, children should know most of the common grapheme– phoneme correspondences. They should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways: 1- reading the words automatically if they are very familiar; 2- decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now well established; 3- decoding them aloud. Children’s spelling should be phonemically accurate, although it may still be a little unconventional at times. Spelling usually lags behind reading, as it is harder. During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.

Many of the texts children read at this stage will be story books, through which they will be developing an understanding of the author’s ideas, plot development and characterisation. It is important that children are also provided with opportunities to read a range of non-fiction texts, which require a different set of strategies. The use of a contents page, index and glossary makes additional demands on young readers as they search for relevant information. In reading simple poems, children need to adapt to and explore the effects of poetic language, continuing to develop their understanding of rhythm, rhyme and alliteration. From an early stage, children need to be encouraged to read with phrasing and fluency, and to take account of punctuation to aid meaning. Much of the reading now will be silent and children will be gaining reading stamina as they attempt longer texts. In addition, as children read with growing independence, they will engage with and respond to texts; they will choose and justify their choice of texts and will begin to critically evaluate them. It is important throughout that children continue to have opportunities to listen to experienced readers reading aloud and that they develop a love of reading.

Help at home Throughout Reception you can support and complement the work being done at school by encouraging your child to practise their reading and writing skills in lots of everyday situations. Children could practise hearing and recording initial, middle and end phonemes in words in real life scenarios such as writing and reading shopping lists, writing thank you cards or reminders to stick on the fridge, labelling Lego models, reading street signs, etc, etc!. When identifying these phonemes it is important to pronounce the sound correctly, and discuss the difference between the letter sound and its name. It is the letter sound that we use when blending and segmenting to read and write.