1. Early Reading at Flitwick Lower
Foundation Stage
2017

2. 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

3. 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!

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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’

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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