Early Reading at Flitwick Lower

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 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: • 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. 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 DfELetters 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. THRASSTeaching 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 consonantphonemes or vowelphonemes.

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 somephonemes 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 onlyreading 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 familiesto 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 • Jackand Jillwent up the hilltofetchapailofwater. 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’)