Phonics & Reading
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 Bug Club Phonics to deliver our systematic synthetic 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).
For further information, the video below explains the basics of phonics and provides practical guidance to help your child at home: