Teeny Reading Seeds for linking sounds to alphabet letters

[debbie]

http://www.phonicsinternational.com/trs.html

Teeny Reading Seeds

Newly launched - some free resources for approximately three to four year olds as they begin to make links between speech sounds and the 26 alphabet letters - both upper and lower case.

This is NOT a systematic, synthetic phonics programme and there is no special 'order' of introducing the letter/s-sound correspondences.

The guidance in the UK government's 'Letters and Sounds' publication is rather vague regarding the introduction of actual letter shapes for the 'Phase One' stage.

Phase One as described in 'Letters and Sounds' includes an emphasis on oral blending and oral segmenting - and yet studies suggest that learning about speech sounds is better accomplished when the teaching includes reference to letter shapes.

The Teeny Reading Seeds resources are not required teaching before starting a systematic, synthetic phonics programme.

They have simply been made available for use for parents and carers of children around the age of three to four who decide that the resources would be helpful for making those first links between letters and sounds.

Note that there is as much emphasis on recognising the capital, or upper case, letters as on the lower case letters. This is because children are just as exposed to capital letters as lower case letters and they are all code for the same sounds.

For example, both A and a are code for the sound /a/ as in Apple or apple - or, indeed, APPLE!

The link for Teeny Reading Seeds can be found in the right hand column on the PI homepage.