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Foundations for Phonics

An early language approach to build the foundations for reading

"Reading floats on a sea of talk"

This quote from James Britton, who was an influential educator, is a good place for us to start to explain our approach. We know that the best way we can develop your child's future reading is through developing their language.Children cannot read if they cannot speak. It is tempting to get children to learn to read early, but we must remember that the best foundations for learning to read are built through talking, songs and rhymes, and sharing books.
 
How can you support your child to get ready for their phonics learning.
If you; read stories, point out words around you and sing songs or rhymes, you are well on your way to laying the foundations for your child's phonics learning! Any time spent talking with your child helps grow their language and sets them up for future success at school.
 
All early years settings follow the government's EYFS statutory framework. We provide learning for your children following the guidelines set out in the framework. For one of the prime areas of learning, Communication and Language, we have chosen to use Little Wandle Foundations to support your child's learning.

The Little Wandle Foundations for Phonics programme gives every child the best possible start to their reading journey. This builds the foundations for children to succeed with phonics in Reception.

We do this using Tuning into sounds and Rhyme time activities.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is making connections between the sounds (phonemes) of our spoken words and the letters that are used to write them down. 

Research tells us that there are important skills that children need to practise to help them learn phonics. Nursery is where we practise these skills.

Phonological Awareness: being able to focus on the sounds in language, not just the meaning.

At first, when babies hear us talking, they only hear a stream of sound. However, they quickly learn to focus on the meaning of what they hear. To get children ready to read, we need to take their focus back to the sound.

For children to learn anything well, they need to listen. As you can imagine, this is particularly true for learning to hear sounds!

Songs and rhymes are a great way to increase children's awareness of rhyming, which is a key part of phonological awareness. What's more, research has shown that children who learn nursery rhymes with their caregivers go on to become better readers. This is only true when they learn these rhymes with an adult – please avoid only letting your child watch nursery rhymes on screens as it doesn't have the same impact.

Another part of phonological awareness is syllables. Syllables are the smaller units within words. For example, the word 'hello' has two syllables – clap as you say 'hel’ and 'lo’. You can also explore the number of syllables in your names, for example, “My name has __ syllables.” (clap the syllables in your name). “How many syllables are there in your name?” If children can hear the syllables within words, it will help them to read and write longer words when they get into Reception. So it is important to give them lots of practice.

Phonemic Awareness: being able to focus on and play around with the sounds within words. 

It is really important when you support sound identification at home that you say the sounds clearly and correctly and do not show children the grapheme (letter). 

At Beechdale, we help children develop their phonemic awareness by focusing on the first sound (or initial sound) in words. 

Alliteration is when words start with the same sound, for example, the big blue boat or the huge hungry horse. Alliteration helps children hear the different sounds in words and can be a lot of fun! 

Oral blending is when we get children to put sounds together in their heads to make a word, for example, b – u – s. When children learn to read, they learn to do just this – to read the individual sounds and blend them together. Oral blending is like the dress rehearsal for reading. It is such an important skill that we do lots of practice in Nursery and would love you to practice at home.

  

"Early knowledge of nursery rhymes may play a considerable role in preparing the child for reading and spelling"  Bryant et al.

This quote is from an important piece of research that was carried out in the 1980s by a team of academics. They found a strong link between how many nursery rhymes children know before starting school and their success at reading and writing in school.  As well as learning lots of nursery rhymes, we will help your child learn all the skills they need to set them up for phonics in Reception.