Literacy
At our setting, we foster a love for literacy from the very start, using engaging and developmentally appropriate approaches tailored to each age group. Our focus is on nurturing early reading and writing skills through interactive and creative activities.
Nursery
In Nursery, we introduce early mark-making and storytelling through Scribble Club and Story Dough. Scribble Club encourages children to explore making marks in a fun and pressure-free way, helping them develop the fine motor skills needed for writing. Story Dough sessions combine storytelling with hands-on dough activities, allowing children to build their imaginative thinking and language skills while strengthening their hand muscles for future writing.
Reception
In Reception, we enhance children's literacy skills through Drawing Club, an engaging approach where children explore stories through drawing and discussion. This builds comprehension, vocabulary, and early writing confidence in a creative and enjoyable way. In Drawing Club, we focus on one story a week we Immerse the children in the world of stories and show them the joy of reading, Developing children’s creativity and imagination to show them that they are extraordinary, bringing the artist picking their creative brains.
We share a treasure trove of vocabulary with children to open up the playground of language to them. Encouraging to use these new words within their play and at home. Vocabulary is a key component of our early years curriculum. It is regularly referred to throughout all interactions. We provide opportunities for the children to encounter vocabulary through high-quality texts, all conversations, during enhanced continuous provision and continuous provision activities, while being read to, during modelled writing, when listening to others, and encounters on trips and with experts. Drawing Club also encourages our children to write using our phonics and number knowledge to write "codes" that make our pictures do magical things. We allow the children to be independent thinkers coming up with their own words/sentences, which unlocks the imagination of their picture, thinking of crazy imaginative unique ideas that could happen to our drawing. As well as this each week, Reception children complete one focused writing piece linked to the theme/topic, helping them apply their developing skills in meaningful contexts.
Phonics – Read Write Inc.
Across EYFS, we follow the Read Write Inc. programme for daily phonics sessions. This structured and systematic approach helps children develop strong foundations in both reading and writing. Through lively and interactive lessons, children learn letter sounds, blending techniques, and segmenting skills to support their reading fluency and writing confidence.
By combining phonics with creative storytelling and mark-making experiences, we provide a rich and engaging literacy curriculum that inspires a lifelong love of reading and writing.
It is crucial for children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading consists of two dimensions: language comprehension and word reading. Language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them, and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together. Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Writing involves transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech, before writing).
parent-booklet.pdfReading
In Nursery we aim to develop a love of books through handling them, reading with an adult, and hearing stories and rhymes read aloud. We want children to love reading and engage in extended sentences about stories; to develop their vocabulary and know how to handle books carefully; learning the different parts of the book (cover, title, pages,) and to understand that print carries meaning. Reading is at the heart of all the EYFs curriculum and stories and rhymes for the stimulus for their topic across the week.
In Reception children continue to develop their vocabulary; they will begin to demonstrate an understanding of what they have read and begin to use their new vocabulary during discussions about their books—fiction, non-fiction, rhymes, poems and role play. They will begin to read fully decodable books in class in small focus Guided Reading groups. Questions are planned for using VIPERS which is a way of encouraging children to develop their comprehension. There is a strong focus on decoding the books, using their phonics knowledge; developing their fluency and expression through carefully modelled prosody reading; and then answering questions verbally.
Useful links to support phonics at home.
set-1-rwi-flashcards.pdfletter_formation_chart (1).pdfphonics_sounds_letter_formation_sheets (1).pdfset-2-rwi-flashcards.pdfrwi_handwriting_phrases (1).pdfgreen-words-1.pdfgreen-words-2.pdf