Reading and phonics
At Batford Nursery School, we believe that a combination of high quality, exciting and engaging core books alongside a robust and structured Phonics programme is key to helping create a firm foundation for young children to learn the core skills in preparation for reading. We know that enjoyment is at the heart of children’s reading experiences and we strive to provide a varied and stimulating curriculum through which children can discover a love of reading for life.
Reading plays a key role across the whole of the Early Years curriculum and can help underpin children’s development - not only as future readers and writers, but in all other aspects of their learning experiences. We are aiming to help enrich and expand children’s vocabulary with a language-rich environment through not only books, but modelling of language, environmental signs and representing the children’s voice and work in the nursery.
Here at Batford Nursery School we are very lucky to have a large library that children can access throughout the day, as well as with their group during their dedicated library session once a week. The library boasts a large selection of high quality core books, fiction and non-fiction, different genres and offers a diverse representation of different ways of life, cultures and traditions.
As a staff, we have curated a ‘core book’ list consisting of high quality literature which hones in on children’s interests and depicts high quality illustrations to capture children’s attention. These core books also link in with key skills which will be focussed on each week during the year to help scaffold children’s understanding and comprehension of stories. Many of the stories link in with our synthetic phonics curriculum and help children to gain a phonological awareness and begin to gain an awareness of patterns and repetition, as well as rhyme and alliteration. All this information can be found in the document below.