The DfE’s recent paper on teaching a broad and balanced curriculum for education recovery focuses on prioritising elements of the curriculum to fill essential knowledge gaps so that pupils can make sense of later work. In subjects such as phonics, gaps in knowledge of letters and sounds can cause significant problems for pupils if not embedded fully before moving to the next level of learning.
As reading is vital for children to fully access the curriculum, making sure early learners are secure in their knowledge of phonics is one of the key priority areas. Reading books that are decodable for a child and pitched at their stage of learning is important for building confidence. On LearningGrids, our decodable books and related activities are organised within cumulative letter groups, so children can work at appropriate levels and progress incrementally through an increasing range of phonemes and graphemes.
Use the Read a Book version of the stories for added speech support. The Read It Yourself version is designed to encourage children to have a go at decoding and reading the text for themselves, so it’s ideal when children are feeling more confident with the phonemes and graphemes at their level.
See also the Talk and Matching sets within each levelled group, providing lots of opportunities for children to:
- practise saying each phoneme – as a discrete phoneme and also within whole words
- match letters (graphemes) to corresponding sounds (phonemes)
- blend phoneme sounds to make words and choose matching pictures
- blend spoken segmented words and match them to corresponding written whole words
- break down spoken words into constituent phonemes to practise oral segmenting
Find all these decodable stories and activities – and lots more resources to support your curriculum catch-up on LearningGrids.
