Please don't worry about learning sounds just yet. The best way to make your child a successful reader is encourage a love of books by reading them stories and making it a really lovely experience with you. By reading a range of different books and talking about the stories, you will be building so many literacy skills including developing their language and communication.
As you read with your children, you can start to tease out information. Here are a few things to think about and perhaps choose one or two of these to work on when you next read to them.
- When introducing a new story - look at the cover, what do you think this story will be about?
- Tell them who the author is and perhaps link it to other books they might like.
- Tell the who illustrated the book and again, they may have another book with the same illustrator.
- Talk about the type of book it is. Is it a story that is made up, a fiction book or is it an information book which is a non-fiction book or is it a poetry book? It is really good to try and build in some variety of genres.
- Talk about the pictures, what you do you think is happening?
- Discuss the different characters you read about and talk about their feelings.
- Make predictions, what do you think will happen next? How do you think this story will end?
- Can they appreciate any of the inference/ pick up on the details that are not directly explained. For example in the Gruffalo, how was the mouse tricking the animals? Why was he surprised to see a Gruffalo? How did he then scare the animals?
- As you read, explain those unusual words and try to bring those up again in other scenarios
- Once you have finished the story you might recap, what was your favourite part? What happened in the end? Can they retell the story?
Do make time to just simply read to them and not always overwhelm them with questioning. It is important to get the balance right.
Letters and Sounds
This is a phonics resource published by the department for Education and Skills.
This link to Oxford Owl explains this systematic approach: What is letters and sounds?
As we mentioned before, there is no need to teach your children the sounds before they start school. As you can see, the sounds work starts in phase 2. Before we get to that we need to work on phase 1 which concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work.
Phase 1 consists of seven interlinking parts:
- environmental sounds
- instrumental sounds
- body percussion
- rhythm and rhyme
- alliteration (words that begin with the same sound)
- voice sounds
- oral blending and segmenting.
Supporting your children with environmental sounds...
*Go on a listening walk. When walking down the road, make a point
of listening to different sounds: cars revving, people talking, birds
singing, dogs barking. When you get home, try to remember all
the sounds you heard. You could try taping the sounds, to listen
to them again, or try reproducing them yourselves, using your
voices or instruments.
*Make sounds, using a range of props, such as running a stick along
a fence or tapping the bin lid. *Invent a secret family ‘knock’ for entering rooms.
*Play ‘sound lotto’. You could make your own game using some of the sounds you heard on your listening walk.
There are games you can access online such as, Can you guess the sounds or Welcome to the Zoo
Here is a sheet of other useful ideas Environmental Sounds
Ways to support your children at home:
instrumental sounds....
* Make your own musical instruments, using cardboard rolls, tins,
dried peas, beans, stones. Shake these loudly, softly, as you are
marching, skipping or stomping. Play ‘Guess what’s inside the
instrument’.
* Sing known songs loudly and then softly, stretch words in known
songs and add new words or sounds.
*Listen to a range of music with your child, from rap to classical.
Encourage your child to move in response to the variety of musical
styles and moods.
Here is a sheet of other useful ideas Instrumental Sounds
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