In school, we make a lot of use of real texts with rich vocabulary as well as reading books. We use stories as a starting point or stimulus for different types of learning. We encourage children to engage with texts through discussion, by answering questions, retelling the story in their own words and making links with prior learning and experiences.
Our children start to learn to read and write by building their knowledge of the initial sounds and of the sounds and patterns in words. In Nursery this is all done through play and by following children’s interests. Children have access to all sorts of resources to support their early mark making (which later becomes writing) and to explore sounds through stories, songs and rhymes. They are encouraged to make marks and write in real contexts.
Into P1, we start to teach reading and the writing of sounds more formally. As your child learns these sounds, they also learn to blend them together to make words. We start with three letter words which we call CVC words, as they consist of a consonant, a vowel and a consonant. Once your child is confident with single sounds and CVC words, they will go on to blend longer words including those with diagraphs which are sounds made up of two letters e.g ch, ng, oa. Click here to learn more about blending.
Not all words can be spelt phonetically e.g. said is not spelt ‘sed’. We call these tricky words and we support children to use word banks to write these correctly as they can’t use their blending skills to work them out.
Phonics supports reading and writing. Children will use their knowledge of sounds and blending to tackle words they want to read, as well as to sound out words they want to write. We encourage them to say it slowly and write the sounds they hear. In the Early stages we don’t correct spelling as we want to encourage confidence and flow. If a young child writes ‘ I sore a bawl and sed to Mum I wantid it.’ we would accept that, as it is phonetically correct but as the child gets older we would start to gently correct e.g. by asking them to check the spelling of ‘said’ on a tricky word card.
During P3 or into P4 (all children are different and will progress at the pace that is right for them) most children begin working on spelling as opposed to phonics. By this stage your child will know all the basic sounds and they are ready to learn spelling rules.
As children move up through the school, we increasingly expect them to spell words correctly rather than phonetically. To do this, they need to learn patterns and rules, homophones (words which sound the same but are spelt differently and have different meanings) and how to use a dictionary and thesaurus. It is also important to be able to edit work. We make time for the children to go over their work to looks for errors to self correct, as well as giving them support to find errors they might not notice on their own. This might be support from an adult or from a peer. We use real life contexts as much as possible to help motivate our writers and we make sure that children know what we are looking for in their written work.
