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.

Phonics

At Shiphay Learning Academy, we use Phonic Bug Club as a scheme of work that supports the delivery of our phonics programme.

We begin in Nursery with Phase 1 phonics which concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. 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). 

Once individuals are ready to progress to Phase Two they will do so but will frequently revisit Phase One for consolidation.

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p
Set 2: i, n, m, d
Set 3: g, o, c, k
Set 4: ck, e, u, r
Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

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.

For more ideas, games and resources about how you can support phonics at home please take a look at the web-link below:

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/