Emergent Literacy Programme (Nursery 2)
What is Emergent Literacy?
Emergent literacy refers to the process through which young children develop foundational skills and attitudes that precede and are necessary for formal reading and writing. It’s like laying the groundwork for later success in reading and writing.
Our Emergent Literacy Programme is tailored for children in the early stages of literacy development. Using an award-winning book-based curriculum and a multi-sensory approach, this programme supports diverse learners in building foundational literacy skills such as phonemic awareness, understanding print concepts, developing narratives, and improving listening and speaking abilities.
What is the difference between phonemic awareness skills and phonics?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (or phonemes) in spoken words. It is a crucial skill that forms the basis for learning to read and write.
Understanding Phonemes: Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language that can change the meaning of words. For example, the word “cat” has three phonemes: /k/ /æ/ /t/.
Phonemic Awareness Skills:
- Segmentation: Recognizing and separating individual sounds in words. For example, identifying the sounds in the word “cat” as /k/ /æ/ /t/.
- Blending: Combining individual sounds to form words. For example, blending /s/ /u/ /n/ to say “sun”.
- Manipulation: Changing or substituting sounds in words to create new words. For example, changing the /p/ in “pan” to /m/ to form “man”.
Importance of Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is essential for learning to decode words while reading and encode words while writing. It helps children understand the alphabetic principle that letters represent sounds in spoken language.
Phonics:
- Phonics is the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and the letters or letter combinations (graphemes) that represent those sounds in written language.
- Phonics instruction teaches children how to decode words by associating specific sounds with corresponding letters or letter patterns. For example, understanding that the letter ‘c’ can represent the /k/ sound as in “cat” or the /s/ sound as in “city”.
- Phonics instruction involves connecting phonemic awareness skills to written language, focusing on the systematic and explicit teaching of sound-symbol correspondences.
- Phonics instruction typically begins after children have developed basic phonemic awareness skills.
Emergent literacy is essential for children to become successful readers and writers later on.
Need help to build a strong foundation in your child’s literacy development? Join us for a trial class!
Interested in resources to build creative and confident writers? Check out our writing prompts!
