At Pilmuir, we take a developmental approach to Emerging Literacy in Primary 1, which involves interactions between adults and children which support children’s language development in literacy and across the curriculum.

The four areas of literacy which skills are developed are phonological awareness, oral language,  pre-handwriting and concepts of print. A screening tool is used to identify and plan for children’s strengths and gaps in phonological awareness and pre-handwriting skills.  Active learning approaches are used as teachers plan to meet the developmental needs of children.  To develop oral language, children’s strengths and gaps are identified and adults make use of play situations to model and support the development of language. Play also provides opportunities for children to access texts and make marks. Sharing books and texts leads to many opportunities for children to retall stories as a foundation for creating their own texts.

We also use synthetic phonics to introduce reading and writing to children in direct teaching lessons. This involves learning the 42 phonic sounds which have fun actions, stories and songs to help the children learn.  We use the Jolly Phonics programme to learn the letter sounds, learn letter formation, how to blend phonics, how to identify sounds in words and about tricky words that can’t be sounded out. The videos below show how this may happen in your child’s class.