Over the Easter holidays, we would appreciate all of our parents and carers, helping their child to concentrate on oral ( not written) blending and segmenting of the sounds in the alphabet, to make words with your child.

There are some very useful videos on ‘Youtube’ to help you with this.

Firstly, this video will help you to teach your child the ‘sound’ each letter makes, instead of it’s name. So for ‘a’ we say ‘ah’ and not ‘ay’. This link is a good explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8KR8ThoPl4

Your child does not initially need to be able to write each letter, but if they enjoy letter formation then please concentrate on the letters in their first name. Please write letters, formed as they demonstrate in this video, not capital letters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYYSBProJH4

Secondly, we are learning to say the initial letter sound in each word. This link explains what your child needs to be able to do. Playing the game, ‘I Spy’, is the best way to encourage your child to say the initial letter sound of an object correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffoa9_vfwHo

Once your child can say the initial letter sound of a word, we encourage them to blend the sounds together to make the word, so c-a-t is the word cat. This video explains how we teach blending letter sounds, to make words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWn-qxUddqo

The opposite of being able to blend letters together, to make a word, is segmenting. When we segment letter sounds in a word, we say the word cat and we can say it is made up of the separate sounds, c-a-t. This link explains how to teach your child segmenting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFlJkWJzmMg

In Foundation 1, we have been trying all kinds of delicious food, from ‘Red Nose Day’ baking, to our bear faces made from bread and fruit. Yum!