As a result we have a community of enthusiastic readers and writers who enjoy showcasing their developing literacy skills. They are confident to take risks in their reading and writing, and love to discuss and share their ideas.
English in the Early Years:
English is one of the seven aspects to the Early Years Framework, known as Literacy and is fundamental to enable a child’s successful development of Reading and Writing as they progress throughout the rest of the school.
In Early Years, we promote early Reading and Writing in children as young as two as we believe it underpins their natural curiosity of storytelling and early mark marking.
In Nursery, Pre-school and Reception, we carefully plan for Literacy throughout our continuous provision, enabling mark making and early sound recognition throughout their independent time. Within every area of the classroom we can provide opportunities for children to mark make, for example, in the Construction Area, we provide simple slips of paper for the children to ‘name and label’ their creations so that we know it is theirs. In Reception, we have introduced ‘Deconstructed Role Play’ to ignite early writing in all children, though particularly those who are a little more reluctant to write, so that they are able to design and make their own role play scenes and use marks to represent their ideas, thoughts and feelings. Throughout Early, we provide fun and exciting reading activities for children including; fishing out sounds from the water tray, squirting different phonemes using water guns as well as taking books into the outdoor areas for children to enjoy while sitting on the grass.
In Nursery and Pre-school, children begin to explore Phase One Phonics and will learnt to discriminate between environmental, instrumental and body sounds as well as beginning to develop and awareness of rhyme, alliteration and oral sound blending.
In Reception, we begin to teach individual phonemes, starting with Phase Two. During daily Phonics sessions we can teach children to discriminate between different phonemes as well as teaching them to segment and blend sounds in words to read them.
In addition to this, we share a love for reading with various stories that can be shared with the children. Every term, we focus on a high-quality text and provide opportunities for the children to sequence, re-tell and use role play to develop their own ideas of storytelling.
