Nursery RWI
Speaking and listening skills, language and vocabulary acquisition and comprehension is the main focus in Nursery. It is important to embed oral activities during the Early Years. To support our children in Nursery to be RWI Ready, we model speaking in complete sentences and have lots of planned talk throughout the day with high quality interactions during and after play and back and forth with children with a range of open and closed questions. We model how to form sentences and get children to add their ideas and repeat them back. We extend vocabulary throughout the day, explaining its meaning and encourage children to use new words taught. For example, we might say “The penguin was lost, he was sad. In fact, he was upset and was beginning to get tearful.”
We have planned storybooks throughout the year that children grow to love, connecting them to the role play area and other areas of the Nursery environment, encouraging children to ‘jump in’ and ‘join in’. These stories are in addition to the wealth of stories, nursery rhymes and songs that are part of the nursery day.
From early on, the Nursery children are encouraged to turn to their buddy to share ideas and answers. This leads into what will be expected of them later in Reception when they begin more formal Read, Write, Inc sessions. Children are introduced to classroom management signals early on. These include 1,2,3 to move around the classroom and get their belongings.
We use lots and lots of oral Fred Talk in Nursery. This is where we say words in sounds and encourage children to work out what is being said. For example, ‘Can you get your c-oa-t (coat)’. Fred the frog can only talk in sounds and they have to work out the words he is saying.
Phonological Awareness
Before teaching the first 30 sounds explicitly we look at the Read, Write, Inc freeze chart and learn about the pictures and what we can see in them. We emphasize the sound at the start of the picture. For example, mmmmmmmm mountain!
Teaching the first 30 sounds:
We have a copy of the Read, Write, Inc frieze up at children’s eye level and teach children the names of the mnemonics – dinosaur, net, mountain, etc. We begin teaching the first 30 sounds during the Summer Term.
By the end of nursery children should be able to say the sound for each of the 25 single letter sounds and 6 special friends, sound out words orally and say the name of the pictures.