Foundation Stage (Ages 4-5)

Our Foundation Stage English course is based upon the requirements of the Early years (under 5s) foundation stage framework (EYFS) which is now followed in all schools in England. The work involves encouraging children to link sounds and letters and to begin to read and write. Children should have access to a wide range of reading materials (books, poems, and other written materials) to ignite their interest. Pupils are taught the following skills:

Reading

The emphasis is on a wide range of strategies to make sense of their reading.

Children are taught:

⦁ to link sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet.
⦁ to hear and say the initial sound in words.
⦁ to segment the sounds in simple words and blend them together in order to decode words using their sounds and blends.
⦁ to begin to read familiar high frequency words and simple sentences.
⦁ to talk about the stories that they hear, demonstrating some understanding of the text; enjoying an increasing range of books and knowing that information can be retrieved from books and computers.

Writing

This is linked very much to reading in that the two activities reinforce each other.

Children are taught:

⦁ to learn to form letters correctly, giving meaning to marks they make as they write.
⦁ to hear, say and record the initial sound in words and begin to use their knowledge of sounds and blends to build simple phonetic words.
⦁ to continue a rhyming string.
⦁ to write their name, labels and captions using some sounds correctly and in sequence.
⦁ to understand that a sentence is built from a group of words.
⦁ to use some clearly identifiable letters to communicate meaning, representing some sounds correctly and in sequence, in an attempt to write a short sentence which can be read by themselves and others: Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.
⦁ to begin to write some irregular high frequency words in their work.

For more information contact us for our Foundation Parent Pack.