1. Reading and Writing In Nursery and Reception
Information for Parents

2. Successful readers and writers have lots of early opportunities to:
Talk and Listen without distractions eg tablets, TV etc
Share books and have stories read to them
Play listening games
Sing songs and rhymes
All these things will help to build up connections in the brain, an enjoyment of language and confidence to try things out.

3. Phonics. Phonics is one of the ways we teach early reading and writing
Phonics is the knowledge of the alphabetic code
The skills of segmenting and blending
Phonics is a highly structured programme and children are taught in progressive phases
Children in Reception and KS1 have a daily 20 minute phonics session

4. What do Children Learn?
Letters have names, but letters also make sounds
Sounds are represented by a single letter, or a group of letters.
Sounds can be put together to read words. We call this blending.
Words can be split into their separate sounds and written down (segmenting)

5. Phonics in Foundation Stage Nursery – Phase 1
Sing alphabet song to learn the names.
Hearing and identifying sounds is the skill which will support your child to learn how to read and write.

6. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Listening Walks to identify sounds in the environment.
When walking home from school:
listen for loud and soft sounds;
play ‘next person to hear...’
and ‘I hear with my little ear’.
Sound lotto

7. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Creating our own sounds with our voices, with body percussion and with bought and home-made instruments.
Create your own sounds with your feet and things you find such as leaves and sticks.
Box of instruments and homemade
Sticks and dry leaves

8. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Looking for rhythm in words (how many syllables?). Using percussion to accompany our speech.
Clap the syllables in children’s names and names of familiar objects, animals and people.
Animal pictures

9. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Listening for start sounds in words.
Play ‘I went to the shops and bought...’
Play ‘I spy’ saying the sound rather than the letter.
Make silly tongue twisters.
Tell stories with characters starting with the same sound, then make mistakes for children to spot.
Objects
Tongue Twister CD
Betha Bus game

10. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Rhyming words.
Singing nursery rhymes; leaving pauses in rhyming books for children to predict; reading rhyming poetry and making up silly rhyming names.
Two Little Dickie Birds example

11. Hearing and identifying sounds.
Hearing end sounds.
Identifying the last sound heard in a word.
Speaking very clearly.
Hearing middle sounds.
Robot games: Alien speaking.
Making up silly words and names.

12. Oral Blending. Saying words in their units of sound.
Robot talk with familiar simple words.
Play ‘Simon says touch your h-ea-d’.

13. Reception Phase 2
When children can hear sounds confidently we introduce them to linking sounds to letters.
Using Jolly Phonics songs and actions.
It is important that children always hear Pure Sounds. So we need to work together on this.
Jolly Phonics songs
Go throughn alphabet pure sounds

14. c a t Blending for reading. See the letter and say the pure sound.
Put the sounds together to hear the word. c a t
Demonstrate cvc words

15. Segmenting for spelling.
Say the word in sound bits like Metal Mike.
Use the letters children know to build simple words. c a t
Demonstrate cvc words
Challenge parents to build word using satpin

16. Order Phase 2 letters and sounds are introduced.
s a t p
i n m d
g o c k
ck e u r
h b f ff l ll ss

17. s a t p i n pat tap at sat nap sit tin pin pit it
These are the first 6 letters and sounds introduced.
Letters are introduced in groups as children can instantly read and write simple words.
pat
tap at
sat
nap
sit
tin
pin
pit it

18. Nonsense Words
nin
sas
pas

19. Phase 3 First the remaining single letter sounds are taught j v w x
y z zz qu
Then we teach digraphs and trigraphs (where two or three letters are used to represent one sound)
ch sh th ng ai ee igh oa oo
ar or ur ow oi ear air ure er

20. Phase 3 a i
This is when knowing the letter names is useful. Telling children the sounds ‘a’ and ‘i’ make /ae/ is confusing. We use letter names to explain this.
By the end of Phase 3 children will have learnt one way of representing each of the 44 sounds which make up the English language.

21. Phase 4 Taught at the end of Reception and beginning of Year 1
Children are taught to blend consonants at:
the end of words, (cvcc words) eg past, milk
the beginning of words (ccvc words) eg stop, train
The beginning and end of words (ccvcc words) eg stamp, flask

22. Letter Formation
Alongside the recognition of letters, blending and segmenting, children are taught to form letters correctly
This year we have moved to a fully cursive script
Formation sheets.

24. Tricky words Words that are not phonetically decodeable
e.g. was, the, I
Some are ‘tricky’ to start with but will become decodeable once we have learned alternative ways of representing sounds (Year 1)
e.g. out, there, want

25. How many phonemes can you hear in
Some Definitions
A Phoneme
This is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
How many phonemes can you hear in
cat? rash? paint? shorter?

26. A grapheme These are the letters that represent the phoneme.
The grapheme could be 1 letter, 2 letters or more.
t ai igh

27. A word always has the same number of phonemes and graphemes!
A phoneme you hear
A grapheme you see
A word always has the same number of phonemes and graphemes!

28. This is where it gets tricky!
Phonemes are represented by graphemes.
A grapheme can consist of 1, 2 or more letters.
A phoneme can be represented/spelled in more than one way ( cat, kennel, choir)
The same grapheme may represent more than one phoneme ( me, met)

29. Grapheme Key Vocabulary
2 letters making one sound
(ai, ee, oo)
3 letters making one sound
(igh , dge )
Where the two letters are not adjacent ( a-e, o-e ) bake, pole
Digraph
Trigraph
Split diagraph
(Year 1)

30. Helpful websites. www.mrthorne.com