Beginning Reading – The importance of the child’s first experiences in reception.
Step 1. Develop a core knowledge or letter and sounds to the point of automaticity.
These visual models may help the early years teachers to appreciate how teaching the knowledge and skills required for beginner reading, spelling and writing fit into the larger picture.
Children are not required to read books which are beyond their level of phonic knowledge, but they do have free access to books and share books with adults in a variety of ways.
The teacher identifies the precise learning intention for activities so, for example, the teacher would not worry about teaching letter/s-sound correspondences whilst reading a lovely story book to the children or demonstrating how an information book can be used!
The idea of 'phonics fast, first and only' is serving to mislead people to think that the 'diet' for children is only phonics when this is not the case at all. Children are not taught letter names or words as whole shapes, they learn their correspondences quickly (from 4 - 6 per week) and then apply them to all-through-the-word blending (synthesising) for reading and all-through-the-word segmenting for spelling from week 1.
Most importantly, they are not taught the 'range of reading strategies' which amount to guessing from picture, context and initial letter cues.
Without competent handwriting skills, children cannot record the spellings they may know orally. A good pencil grip needs to be reinforced from the earliest days in school if not before.
For children identified with literacy special needs, the teacher may need to go back to the core knowledge and skills as illustrated - see the downloadable assessments on the SyntheticPhonics.com homepage
Step 2: Learning the spelling variations of the sounds of speech.
Once the children know to automaticity a first/common version of letters and letter combinations to represent the 42+ single sound units of speech, then they need to learn the spelling variations of the sounds of speech.
They need the knowledge and flexibility to know the letter/s-to-sounds correspondences (for reading) and the sound/s-to-letters correspondences (for spelling).
Beware of programmes which tend to over-emphasise the reading process or the spelling process - pupils need to know and understand the reversibility of the alphabetic code.
Handwriting skills are also required to automaticity and fluency - so many pupils are let down by insufficient opportunity to practise thoroughly because of a lack of basic skills rehearsal.
As the children gain basic reading and writing knowledge and skills, they themselves will apply these to a wider range of activities and integration will occur with the wider curriculum - both planned by the teacher and occurring naturally through the children's input.