Over the past few weeks in Nursery, we have been introducing phonics to the children. Phonics is when we match the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters.
The teaching of phonics starts with the sounds s, a, t, p, i, n. These particular sounds are taught first because that combination of letters can create a large number of basic words that, later on, the children will be able to decode, e.g. sat, pin, pan, sit, tap etc.
Each week, we have been focusing on a different sound and the children have been amazing! So far, we have looked at s, a, t and p. We have been practicing how to read the sounds, how to write them and how to spot them when we are listening to a story.
When we practice writing the sounds, each sound has a particular rhyme to help us remember how to write it.
As well as practicing reading and writing the sounds, we have also been doing activities to help us identify the sound at the start of a word – e.g. sun, ant, pizza, turtle. We are also really good at spotting sounds in the environment too!
The children are really enjoying our phonics sessions and it has been a pleasure to watch their excitement when they are able to spot the different sounds in our learning environment. Each week, we will let you know which sound we are teaching the children, so that you are able to support their learning at home.
Ways you can help at home:
- When you are reading with your child, encourage them to spot the sounds s, a, t and p in the words.
- Use the rhymes to help your child to form the letters – this could be on paper, in glitter, in sand etc
- Go out for a walk and encourage your child to look for things starting with each sound.
- Try to make up some sentences where each word starts with one of the sounds, e.g. Tall Tim tickles teddies!
- Click on ‘how to pronounce the sounds’ below to support learning at home – we use pure sounds to help the children blend sounds together at a later stage. Click here: how to pronounce the sounds