In the Early Years, we provide high quality reading experiences that are essential in supporting our children in their journey to become competent readers.
Nursery and Reception have their own stimulating reading areas, which is accessible by children, as well as a wide range of resources and opportunities to apply reading skills, for example: name cards, alphabet mats, print in the environment, signs and labels, puppets and props to use to retell and act out stories.
At Kingsland C.E. Academy we believe that the systematic approach to the teaching of phonics offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers.
We use Monster Phonics as our phonics programme. It begins in Nursery where it helps to develop children’s vocabulary through role-play, discussions, sentence building and using productive questioning. The children are introduced to the monsters and their stories.
Children in our Nursery start phonics from the point of entry. They focus on the seven aspects of sound, which are; Environmental sounds, Instrumental sounds, Body percussion, Rhythm and rhyme, Alliteration, Voice sounds, Oral blending and segmenting
In reception, children undertake a daily 30 minutes phonic session. Letter formation of each letter is taught as part of the main phonics lesson. The introductory PowerPoint shows the children how to form the grapheme which is also modelled by the teacher. The children then ‘air write’ before writing on whiteboards.
Children also further develop their phonics through daily guided reading sessions. Children work in small groups with a teacher to read decodable books which encourage them to read using systematic synthetic phonics as the prime approach.
Throughout the year parents are invited to participate on free Monster Phonics webinars to help support their child reading at home.
Monster Phonics Decodable books
The Monster phonics books introduce new grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the same order as the teaching programme, and the progression within the books is cumulative, so children can practise the phonics that they have already learned earlier in their lessons.
Each high frequency word (decodable and common exception word) is also taught in the programme before the children read it in a book. Each book focuses on a key grapheme. Monster phonics uses colour to help children learn the link between sound and spelling.
Reception books - Stages 1, 2, 3, 3.1 and 3.2
There are 60 books in the reception stages. Reception books support the teaching of initial sounds and consonant digraphs to help the fundamental stages of reading. Each book has an optional section for an adult to read at the bottom of each page. The text is not critical for the understanding of the story but adds further detail to help bring the story to life.
Stages 1, 2 and 3 focus on blending the initial sounds and the consonant digraphs.
Stage 3.1 practises digraphs and trigraphs.
Stage 3.2 practises reading CVC+ words.
Developing a pleasure for reading
Visit from a local librarian
In EYFS, children receive a visit from a local librarian. They talk to the children about the library and how they can join. They bring exciting books from the library to share with them. The children all get given a book of their own to take home and share with their family.
Shared reading
The children in Nursery take part in shared reading sessions daily. They use the Pie Corbett reading spine texts which are revisited several times throughout the year. This enables the children to build language skills, enhance their vocabulary, provides opportunities to engage in expressive reading and builds confidence and a love of books.
Independent reading
Each child will firstly take home a lilac banded book to share with an adult at home. They then take home a reading book which their group has read in Guided Reading each week. This book is changed according to the Monster Phonics timetable being followed. For example: If a child is in the ‘Stage 2’ Monster Phonics reading group, they will take home a copy of the text read in school to develop fluency, they will also take home a corresponding book bag book of the same colour to help develop word recognition and their decoding skills.
Library books
Children have the opportunity to take home a library book of their choosing. They have a set day where they choose a book they’d like to take home and share with their family. These are changed the following week.
Credits:
Created with an image by Pixel-Shot - "Open magic book with flying hot air balloons and growing tree on dark background"