What's On In Foundation

Phonics

We are certainly becoming excited about our learning in Foundation! Every day our students spend 25 mins a day learning about letters, their sounds and how to blend these together to read words. We explore letters each week that come from our word of the week. Foundation students are mini experts in the words cat, ant, tin, tap and sun. Letter tiles are often used to make words…even some funny sounding pretend words! Mini whiteboards and chalk, and of course our writing pencils, are often the tools we use to show our growing phonetic knowledge.

Students are also discovering the skill and joy of finding words that rhyme. Our ‘Cat in the Hat’ hats show our knowledge of words that have ‘at’ in common. Tin rhymes with win, tap rhymes with map and sun rhymes with fun. We could go on rhyming forever!

Reading

We are so proud of how all of our students are showing an interest and early love of reading. Individual book boxes are filled with good fit and browsing books to enjoy. Whilst we can use our decoding skills that our phonics lessons teach us, we also use other important strategies to help us. You might see us looking at the picture for clues, looking for our coloured high frequency words (that we are also doing a great job at reading) or even looking for a little word hiding within (this has…. is hiding in it!) Students enjoy daily shared reading, where we work together to explore and read a text. We also enjoy partner reading, where we  can read a familiar book to a friend to practise our fluency, expression and develop confidence!

Visualisation is where we listen to words, and create a mini movie or image in our minds. This comprehension strategy helps to make more meaning from the words we read. We have been practising listening to a mini story, visualising the images, and then drawing a picture to show what is our heads. We do this often when we listen to someone reading us a chapter book, or books that only have a few images to support the text.