Mulberry Bush Nursery Group Letters and Sounds – Parent information

 

Across the Mulberry Bush Nursery Group, children take part in a high-quality communication, language and literacy development programme (C.L.L.D.) designed to promote your child’s learning through a play-based approach. To support the teaching of C.L.L.D. in nurseries and schools, a phonics teaching programme called Letters and Sounds is used. It builds on the activities the children have already experienced in the setting. Children learn through lots of play and activities and are encouraged to use their increasing phonics knowledge in freely chosen activities. The Letters and Sounds programme is divided into six phases with phase one being introduced in nurseries.

Letters and Sounds – Phase 1

In this ongoing phase your child will be learning to:

• Have fun with sounds.
• Listen carefully.
• Develop their vocabulary.
• Speak confidently to you, other adults and other children.
• Tune into sounds.
• Listen and remember sounds.
• Talk about sounds.
• Understand that spoken words are made up of different sounds

Phase 1 consists of seven interlinking parts:

• 1. Environmental sounds.
• 2. Instrumental sounds.
• 3. Body percussion.
• 4. Rhythm and rhyme.
• 5. Alliteration (words that begin with the same sound).
• 6. Voice sounds.
• 7. Oral blending and segmenting.

Ways to support your children at home:

1. Environmental sounds

• Go on a listening walk, making 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 again or try reproducing them yourselves using your voice or instruments.
• Make sounds using a range of props such as running a stick along a fence or tapping on a bin lid.
• Invent a secret family ’knock’ for entering rooms.
• Play sound lotto. Commercial sound lotto can be purchased from many children’s toy stores but making your own from your sound walk would be far more rewarding.

2. 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.

3. Body percussion

• Learn some action rhymes such as ‘wind the bobbin up’.
• Play some commercially produced tapes and CDs. Clap along with familiar rhymes and learn new ones.
• Listen to the sounds your feet make when walking/running/skipping: slowly, softly, fast, stomping hard, in flip-flops, boots, high heels.
• Try different types of claps: clap your hands softly, fast and make a pattern for your child to follow. Do the same clapping on your thighs or stomping with your feet. Tap your fingers. Click your tongue.
• Invent a special family clap routine for when someone does something really well.

4. Rhythm and rhyme

• Get into the rhythm of our language: bounce your child on your knee to the rhyme of a song or nursery rhyme, march or clap to a chant or poem.
• Help your child move to the rhythm of a song or rhyme.
• Read or say poems, songs, nursery songs and rhyming stories as often as you can, try to use gestures, tap regular beats and pauses to emphasis the rhythm of the piece.
• Add percussion to mark the beats using your hands, feet or instruments.
• Try out some rhythmic chanting such as ‘two, four, six, eight, hurry up or we’ll be late’ or ‘bip bop boo, who are you?’

5. Alliteration (words that begin with the same sound

• Alliteration is a lot of fun to play around with. Your child’s name is a good place to start, e.g. ‘Jolly Jack Jumped’, ‘Milo makes music’, ‘Gurpreet gets the giggles’.
• Encourage other family members to have a go, e.g. ‘Daddy is doing the dishes’, ’Mummy makes a mess’.
• Emphasise alliteration in songs and stories, e.g. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’.
• Play around with familiar songs to emphasise alliteration such as ‘Old MacDonald had some sheep, shoes, shorts, with a sh sh here and a sh sh there’.
• Identity the odd one out, e.g. cat, cup, boy, car.
• Collect items from the park, garden or from around the house that start with the same sound.
• When shopping think about the items your buying and say ‘A tall tin of tomatoes’, ‘A lovely little lemon’. Encourage your child to do the same.

6. Voice sounds

• Repeat your infant’s vocalisations.
• Make fun noises or nonsense words.
• Say words in different ways (fast, slowly, high, low, using a funny voice).
• ‘Sing’ known songs using only sounds, e.g. ‘la, la, la’ and ask your child to guess the song.
• Vary your tempo and pitch when reading stories.
• Make voices for characters when reading stories.
• Read or tell stories.

7. Oral blending

• This is oral (spoken). Your child will not be expected to match the letter to the sound at this stage. The emphasis is on helping children to hear the separate sounds in words and to create spoken words.
• Oral blending and segmenting is a later skill that will be important when it comes time to read and write. Being able to hear the separate sounds within a word and then blend them back to understand that word is really important.
• Blending is a vital skill for reading. The separate sounds (phonemes) of the word are spoken aloud, in order, all through the word. For example, the adult would say c-a-t = cat.
• Segmenting is a vital skill for spelling. The whole word is spoken aloud, then broken up into its separate sounds (phonemes) in order, all through the word. For example, the adult would say cat = c-a-t.

 

Useful websites:

 

www.talktoyourbaby.org.uk This website provides lots of information for parents and carers of babies and young children and has suggestions of activities, features, DVDs, books, and events that are useful and fun.

www.parentscentre.gov.uk/foragegroup/3to5years/readandwritetogether This link to the Parents Centre website gives some really good ideas about how you can enjoy sharing books with your child and tells you a bit more about phonics.

 

www.parentscentre.gov.uk/foragegroup/5to7years/alittlereadinggoesalongway This link gives ideas about how to help your child as they are learning to read.

 

www.ican.org.uk This website provides lots of information for parents and teachers on the importance of speaking and listening skills for young children’s development. Although aimed at early communication development there is a lot of very useful information and materials such as Chatter Matters that can be downloaded from the website and some free materials can be ordered.

www.nationalliteracytrust.org.uk/familreading/parents A wealth of information about how to make reading and writing fun for you and all your family. Promotes their campaign to make ‘every home a reading home’.

www.bookstart.co.uk This website provides information about the national Bookstart scheme and gives information about sharing books with your child and you can find out about Bookstart events in your area which you can go to with your child.

www.read-count.org/index.asp A website for you and your child to explore together. It will give you some ideas about reading with your child and has online games for young children to play with you and on their own. It also has ideas for games to play away from the computer.

www.basic-skills.co.uk This website will keep you updated on a range of literacy developments.

www.early-education.org.uk ‘Learning Together’, ‘The road to reading’ and ‘Making their mark – children’s early writing’ leaflets can be downloaded from this website.

Other ways you can support your children at home:

Mark making

• Mark making is the first step towards writing. Mark making in the early stages is closely linked to physical development. The more opportunities your child has to develop large and small movement in their arms, hands and fingers the easier it will be to make marks with a variety of tools.
• Activities such as digging, ‘painting’ outdoor surfaces with water and a large brush, sweeping, and swishing a scarf through the air in different shapes will help develop large motor movement.
• Small or fine motor movement will be needed to hold pencils and pens correctly. Hanging out the washing and playing with pegs, using a peg board, and picking up grains of rice with fingers and tweezers will help develop the pincher grip needed for writing.
• In the early stages of learning to write, your child will like to experiment making marks on paper with a variety of writing tools such as brushes, pens, pencils and felt tip markers. They will often include drawings with their writing. Sometimes you will write for them. It is a good idea at this stage to only use lower caser letters, introducing capitals only for names.

Talking & Listening

• Make time to listen to your child talking – as you collect them from nursery, as you walk or travel home by car, in the supermarket as you shop, at meal times, bath times, etc.
• Switch off the TV, radio and mobile phones and really listen!
• Show that you are interested in what they are talking about, ask questions or make a response.
• Make a collection of different toy creatures and say the sound it might make as you play together.
• Play a tune. Make or buy some simple shakers, drums and beaters – play a simple tune and ask your child to copy. Have fun!
• Use puppets and toys to make up stories or retell known ones. Record your child telling the story and play it back to them.

Sound talk

• Try breaking down simple words when you are giving instructions or asking questions.
• For example ‘Can you find your h-a-t hat?’ ‘Sit on the s-ea-t seat’ ‘Eat your f-oo-d food’.
• It is really important to say the sounds (phonemes) aloud, in order, all through the word.
• Prior to this your child should have experienced lots of the environmental, instrumental and body percussion, rhythm and rhyming, alliteration, and voice sounds activities to tune in their ears.

Other ideas

• Read every day to your child.
• Set up a place where your child can experiment with mark making both inside and outside using gloop, paint, pens, stamps and stencils onto a variety of surfaces such as paper, cardboard and material.
• Collect a variety of pencils and pens and keep them handy for your child.
• Create a special writing bag to keep little writing tools in for travelling in the car or visiting the doctor’s. Change the contents regularly.

What to do if your child is reluctant to read or write at home:

• Relax. It is important not to worry if your child shows no inclination to write at home. The important thing is to keep sharing books and talking together.
• Make sure your child sees you reading/writing.
• Spread books around the house for your child to dip into.
• Let your child choose what they like to read – books, comics, catalogues.
• Read favourite books over and over again. Let yourself go, enjoy!
• Make words together using magnetic letters.
• Make up a story together about one of their toys.
• Buy stickers of a favourite film or TV programme and make a book about it.