Reading in EYFS

In FS1 children begin the year by working their way through Phase 1 phonics, this teaches pre-reading skills such as; listening, identifying and matching sounds using instruments, everyday objects and their voices, playing with rhyme and alliteration and orally blending and segmenting sounds in words. In the final term of FS1, if ready, the children then move on to Read, Write, Inc, the phonics scheme we follow at Kings Oak PLC. The children will learn the matching pictures and learn to identify and say the first eight graphemes in the program. 

This then continues into FS2 where children are taught to recognise more graphemes including digraphs and trigraphs and they are taught to segment and blend these graphemes to read words and then sentences. By the end of FS2 children should be reading short stories in green/purple books. 

As well as phonics, we also know how important it is to expose children to high-quality story books. Each week we focus on a core story in both FS1 and FS2. The core stories are carefully chosen to ensure that they support the development of language and vocabulary as well as being engaging and exciting stories to promote a love of reading. These stories are used in teaching and read repetitively so that children have memorable knowledge of quality stories. Although these stories are core to our curriculum, children are also immersed in a wider range of books and stories through; stories in the provision and in other lessons such as maths and topic, as well as parent reading mornings once a week.