Ready to Read

The start of this term has seen the FS2 children embark on the formal aspect of their learning to read and write journey.

FS1 was a year of preparation; hearing and listening to different sounds, playing with alliteration, rhyme and even blending and segmenting words orally. They listened to countless stories and gained an awareness of how text carries meaning. They used lots of different tools for mark making and played with lots of different resources building up their fine motor skills. These foundation skills in reading and writing will continue to be enhanced over the next few years, but now they are also being introduced to all the letters.

At BNIS, reading is taught through a multi-sensory approach. In FS2 the children are introduced to a few letters and sounds a week. With each sound, the children learn a song, an action to go with the sound and a short phrase about how you write it. They get to make letters, paint them, pick them up and turn them round in order to really explore their shapes.

By the end of the first week of term, the children had learnt the sounds s, a, t, p and they were already having a go at reading simple words such as at, pat and sat. Each day they are reminded of all the sounds learnt before. This is done in a fun and playful way such as identifying the letters on flash cards using different voices, alliteration games, hide and seek letter games.

The children are amazing learners and are taking this all on board with enthusiasm and enjoyment of the challenge. At the same time, they are also being introduced to some tricky words (words that are not phonetic) such as ‘the’.

For the first few weeks of this term, a new letter and sound was introduced almost every day. They now have a couple of weeks of consolidation before being introduced to even more letters and sounds after half term.