One of the newest Government agendas is focused on narrowing the gap between the most and least disadvantaged children and families in society. In a bid to counteract poor achievement in basic skills, and also in response to the Rose Review on the limitations of current teaching of reading and writing, the Primary National Strategies team has produced the 'Letters and Sounds' guidance.
This is a phonics teaching package, full of useful ideas and advice, aimed at improving outcomes for children's learning. Practitioners working with three- and four-year-old children should pay close attention to the messages in this new guidance. This is because, together with the Early Years Foundation Stage, it will help ensure that children begin to develop a love for playing with words and gain confidence in expressing ideas and communicating feelings.
The structure of the document makes it sufficiently versatile for it to be used across the whole Key Stage 1 age range, starting with children in the nursery, up to seven-year-olds in Year 2.
The guidance can be used as a valuable tool to support all ages of primary school children who experience difficulties with reading and writing English.
Structure of the document
Phase 1
This is a phonics programme that is based on the premise that children require particular levels of knowledge and skills to become competent readers and proficient writers. For children in nursery and reception class, the focus is on the need to build confidence in both speaking and listening.
It lays particular stress on how adults should engage children in worthwhile activities and provide them with plenty of opportunities to communicate ideas and feelings about what they are doing.
It makes clear that there is a significant role for all aspects of rhyme, singing and reading books in improving outcomes for children. It is a crucial message to which early years practitioners need to be committed.
Phase 2
This is the time to begin focused work on reading and writing skills, making decoding and word-building the order of the day. Children are expected to have lots of practice at learning to break words down into letters and sounds when they read and also to build words when they start to write. This is decoding at its simplest and most effective.
Phase 3
This covers the work that is more technically complicated - for example, blending consonants, such as 's' and 'h' to make 'sh' words, such as in 'shop' and 'ship', and also the blending of vowels, such as 'o' and 'a' to make 'oa' in 'boat' and 'coat'.
Phase 4
At this stage, attention moves to the way that more complicated words are built from more than one set of combined sounds, such as 'shoot', 'speck' and 'trunk'. Lots of practice in verbalising, decoding and writing similar constructions helps make children more familiar with handling this higher level of difficulty.
This phase also focuses on the need to develop confidence in using the most common words which do not follow straightforward spelling rules, such as 'where', 'when', 'some', 'there', 'said', 'what' and 'who'.
Phase 5
This is the phase when children need intense practice at handling complicated sound and letter blends that will help them develop higher levels of deciphering skills.
Some of the hardest words in English look and sound very strange, and only by frequent and repeated use can anyone remember how to write or read them. For this reason they have to be learned virtually by rote. They include such words as 'would', 'could', 'meant', 'should', 'asked', 'people' and 'through'.
Phase 6
This is the phase in which all of the skills that have been learned over the previous five phases are brought together to help children succeed in reading automatically, reading silently and writing proficiently. It is the culmination of endless practice at sounding out and blending letters to make sounds.
AT THE EARLIEST STAGE
The structure set out in the whole document should help teachers and early years practitioners plan purposefully to improve children's communication skills.
In Phase 1 you should place specific emphasis on:
- Aspect 1 - developing a rich environment in which children become used to listening to sounds and discriminating between natural and man-made noises.
- Aspect 2 - listening to music and using instruments so that children develop knowledge of controlling pitch, beat and rhythm.
- Aspect 3 - developing physical and fine motor skills to control tools and explore the noises that can be made using different parts of the body, such as clapping, humming, snapping fingers and stamping.
- Aspect 4 - helping children develop a love of beat and rhythm through sharing songs, nursery rhymes and stories.
- Aspect 5 - making word play fun by emphasising words that begin with the same letters (alliteration) or end with the same sounds (rhyming).
- Aspect 6 - focusing children's attention on made-up words that describe the sounds associated with objects and animals, such as the 'swish, swish' of grass blowing in the wind, the 'drip, drip' of the rain or the 'moo, moo' of cows in a field.
CONCLUSIONS
The intention in Phase 1 is to help formalise an approach to language that encourages practitioners to become aware of the variety of contexts in which they should support children's acquisition of skills. Each of the six aspects is unique; however, together they all affect the outcomes of learning, creating a unified progression for practitioners to implement.
It is essential that the programme is not delivered in an overly rigid way at the earliest stages. It must never become oppressive or boring. It is also essential for adults to make a strong commitment to the principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage for promoting language and communication skills and to share these ideas and intentions with parents.
Encouraging families to play their part in supporting children at home is an incredibly powerful way to embed best practice and to ensure that there are consistent messages about supporting speaking and listening skills.
Parents want to feel involved in their children's education and need detailed guidance about the teaching methods that are being used at school. Practitioners will find that helping parents become involved in the process through regular contact and specific training sessions will be enormously rewarding and also will increase children's attainment. Parents are key to ensuring that lessons learned in nursery are repeated in the home. Children who benefit from this consistent approach are most likely to succeed.
The joy of this document is that it rubber-stamps the pro-active approach to learning and makes clear that the most effective way of developing language and communication skills is to interact with children throughout the day and use a wide variety of experiences, indoors and outdoors, to explore sounds and express ideas.
It is good to talk, sing and read. Children copy adults and learn to value whatever adults do and say, which is why adults working with children should learn to be highly expressive and creative. So, practitioners need to thoroughly absorb the 'Letters and Sounds' guidance in order to develop a range of strategies that improve speech and language acquisition in nurseries and classrooms.
LINKS TO EYFS GUIDANCE
- EE 3.1 Observation, Assessment and Planning
- L&D 4.1 Play and Exploration
- L&D 4.2 Active Learning
- L&D 4.3 Creativity - Critical Thinking