Phonics

Spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development in the revised 2021 Early Learning Goals. The aim is to reduce the language gap between children from language-rich homes and those who are not.

These three things make the biggest difference to reduce the language gap:

1. Reading aloud

2. Teaching children poems and songs

3. Talking with children

Nursery children rely on read-a-lot, talk-a-lot, and sing-a-lot environments! Nursery is probably the most important phase of a child’s reading journey.

Environmental/ instrumental/ body percussion

Here are some ideas to try at home/ out and about:

When you go out, stop and listen to the sounds you can hear, and see if your child can identify them
Hiding an egg timer in a room and try to find it using the ticking sound
Exploring sounds that music instruments make (home made shakers – empty bottles with rice etc.)

Perform a pattern of sounds using your body and get them to copy (play ‘Simon Says clap hands/click fingers’)

Rhythm and Rhyme

‘The better children are at detecting rhymes the quicker and more successful they will be at learning to read.’

More ideas:

You could match up rhyming words pairs – you need some paper or card, draw/stick on/print pictures of pairs of rhyming words (e.g. man and van)
’I spy with my little eye something that rhymes with cat’.

Alliteration

Alliteration is a group of words that start with the same sound. Show and tell on Fridays (have fun looking for things that start with sound ‘i’ this week.

More ideas:

You can create your own tongue twisters as they occur in everyday life – Harrison’s hairy hat, Alex’s amazing apple.
Create a sensory box with lentils/sand/rice etc and hide two sets of objects starting with two initial letter sounds in there (e.g dice, dinosaur, duck, dog and car, cat, cap and candle). Children hunt them out and the sort them onto trays or in hoops according to the sounds.

Voice Sounds

This literally explores sounds we can make with our voices.

Ideas:

Read through stories and use your voice as sound effects.
Show pictures of things and try and come up with appropriate sounds for it – ‘brrrrrrriiiing’ for a telephone etc.
Encourage them to look in a mirror whilst making the noises to see how the shape of their mouth changes for each sound.

Segmenting and Blending

Not as scary as it sounds, honestly! It’s all about breaking down words into individual sounds.

Some ideas:

Model blending words (“Let’s go and feed the d-o-g, dog”, “Put on your h-a-t, hat”)
With a selection of familiar objects play ‘I spy’ – “I spy with my little eye a f-i-sh’/ c-a-t / s-o-ck, and see if they can guess from the segmented words, and vice versa.
Segmenting - Introduce a toy that speaks slowly or like a robot.