Early Reading and Phonics
Reading and Phonics in the Early Years
At Park Walk we feel passionately that fluent, confident reading is key to both academic success as well as your child’s well-being and happiness. During their time in our Nursery and Reception classes, we will dedicate ourselves to laying the foundations for every child to become a successful reader and writer, as well as encouraging a lifelong love of reading and books.
Early Reading in the Early Years is taught by targeting both fluent word reading as well as comprehension. Both skills are equally important for children to develop, but require different teaching strategies.
Phonics
Skilful and fluent word reading is taught from an early age through speedy decoding and recognition of printed words. This is taught during daily, systematic phonics sessions, using the Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) phonics programme.
Each day your child will learn new skills to help them on their journey to reading fluently.
In Nursery, the focus of phonics sessions will be on encouraging the children to listen carefully to different sounds, and developing their blending, segmentation and sound discrimination skills, through fun games and exercises.
In Reception, phonics sessions will focus more on teaching letter sounds (phonemes) and their corresponding graphemes (the written form of the phoneme). They will be taught to blend sounds together to read words (e.g., h – a – t = hat), and segment sounds in words, to help them write (e.g., sheep = sh – ee - p). Whilst initially focusing on letter sounds, every child will progress to reading words, sentences and books throughout the year.
More information on ELS can be found here.
All children will also receive phonics books and phonics homework each week to take home to read and practise with a parent or carer, which will be carefully matched to their skill level, and planned to support what is happening in class.
In addition, every child reads multiple times a week with their teacher and teaching assistant and extra booster sessions run for children who need more support.
Please check your child’s Class Dojo page for tips on supporting your child with their phonics, including a video to help ensure you are pronouncing the sounds as we do in class.
Comprehension
Learning to read is about listening and understanding, as well as decoding letters printed on the page. Comprehension skills are therefore just as important to every young reader, and at Park Walk we teach them by immersing all children in an environment rich in high-quality communication and discussion, story-telling, and role-play, as well as providing daily opportunities for children to practise their budding literacy skills.
Reading to, and with, your child is the best, most supportive, way of building a child’s comprehension, and at Park Walk we are lucky enough to have a bank of quality, engaging story books which we share with our children throughout each day. Through repeatedly hearing carefully selected stories, children are exposed to a wide range of words, ideas and concepts which supports them in building their own vocabulary and improving their understanding of both words and the world around them, all of which is vitally important as they start to read.
Throughout Nursery and Reception, staff develop a love of reading in our children through reading aloud our own favourite stories, introducing children to new high-quality books, as well as re-telling the classics again and again. Children can gain just as much from hearing (and joining in with!) The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the 10th time, as they can from the 1st reading of a new book!
At Park Walk all children will have the opportunity to listen to, and join in with, at least 2 stories each day, and we carefully balance allowing children to quietly sit, listen and absorb a story, with building their comprehension skills by asking them to engage in a discussion with us about the book. To further develop your child's comprehension skills all children will also borrow from our class Book Corners 1 - 2 quality story books each week to share with you at home.
Please also check out our recommended reading list for Early Years, as well as Class Dojo, and the front of your child’s Reading Record, for tips on how you can support your child’s reading and comprehension development at home.
