The importance of reading and instilling good day-to-day routines around it in Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) should never be underestimated. It helps children to feel safe, happy and secure, which in turn supports their personal, social and emotional development.

It is important because this is a time in which they can explore and should be encouraged to have fun listening to, telling and acting out stories. They should becoming familiar the start and finish of a story and the pictures and characters that come with it. It helps to model and expose them to a rich and varied language content. 

At home you can encourage a love of reading by modelling it yourself. Children love to copy the grown-ups! It is also recommended that you share a book each day. Many find bedtime a good time to put this into their daily routine.

At Shiphay Learning Academy, we use Bug Club Phonics to deliver our systematic synthetic phonics programme.

We begin in Reception with an exploration and recap of some of Phase 1 phonics, which concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work that starts in Phase 2 and progresses to Phase 4.  The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects. Each aspect contains three strands: Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination), Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing) and Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension). 

 Bug Club Phonics teaches a new grapheme and related phoneme, or alternative spellings to previously taught phonemes, in every Phoneme Session. Each unit concludes with a Language Session, which includes the teaching of associated irregular words. This fast pace, backed up by daily revision of past teaching, has proved the most effective and successful method of phonic training. 

The order of grapheme introduction ensures that children start reading and spelling a wide range of words at the earliest possible stage. Teachers plan for the progression of phonics teaching, ensuring that it is matched to children's needs. As soon as each set of letters is introduced, children will be encouraged to use their knowledge of the letter sounds to blend and sound out words. For example, they will learn to blend the sounds s-a-t to make the word sat. They will also start learning to segment words. For example, they might be asked to find the letter sounds that make the word tap from a small selection of magnetic letters.

In addition to daily teaching sessions, children are given regular opportunities to practice sounding and blending words in a meaningful context. Following Bug Club Phonics recommended scheduling in-class reading practice sessions, children read their phonics book least three times a week, using the same book to complete three re-reads to develop fluency. In-class reading practice sessions can be 1:1 with an adult, or in groups with an adult with daily reading practice sessions for children who need extra support. To consolidate these skills, we also recommend three readings of your child's phonics reading book each week. 

For further information, the video below explains the basics of phonics and provides practical guidance to help your child learn to read at home:

All you need to know about phonics - Bug Club Phonics Video

For further support regarding the correct pronunciation of each sound and the corresponding Bug Club action for the sound, please click on the pictures below: