English, Reception

There are six broad areas of study for children. Language devlopment is a core element of Reception practice and permeates throughout the curriculum.

Language for Communication - children will learn to:

  • Use language for an increasing range of purposes
  • Use talk to gain attention and sometimes use action rather than talk to demonstrate or explain to others
  • Initiate conversation, attend to and take account of what others say
  • Use vocabulary and forms of speech that are increasingly influenced by their experience of books
  • Consistently develop a simple story, explanation or line of questioning
  • Interact with others, negotiating plans and activities and taking turns in conversation
  • Sustain attentive listening, responding to what they have heard with relevant comments, questions or actions
  • Enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language, and readily turn to it in their play and learning
  • Use simple grammatical structures
  • Listen with enjoyment, and respond to stories, songs and other music, rhymes and poems and make up their own stories, songs, rhymes and poems
  • Link statements and stick to a main theme or intention
  • Speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control and show awareness of the listener
  • Extend vocabulary, especially by grouping and naming
  • Have confidence to speak to others about their own wants and interests
  • Extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words

Language for Thinking - children will learn to:

  • Begin to make patterns in their experience through linking cause and effect, sequencing, ordering and grouping
  • Use language to imagine and recreate roles and experiences
  • Begin to use talk to pretend imaginary situations
  • Begin to use talk instead of action to rehearse, reorder and reflect on past experience, linking significant events from own experience and from stories, paying attention to how events lead into one another
  • Use talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events

Linking sounds and letters - children will learn to:

  • Hear and say the initial sound in words and know which letters represent some of the sounds
  • Link sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet
  • Use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words
  • Continue a rhyming string
  • Hear and say sounds in words in the order in which they occur
  • Produce some consonant blends (for example, 'tr' in tree, 'bl' in blue)
  • Start to mark two and three syllables in words
  • Make attempts at reading familiar words in picture books
  • Recognise several letters
  • Produce more than half of the consonant sounds accurately
  • Write a few letters when named and make a good attempt at writing own name
  • Produce almost all vowel sounds accurately

Reading - children will learn to:

  • Show an understanding of the elements of stories, such as main character, sequence of events and openings, and how information can be found in non-fiction texts to answer questions about where, who, why and how
  • Know that print carries meaning and, in English, is read from left to right and top to bottom
  • Retell narratives in the correct sequence, drawing on language patterns of stories
  • Know that information can be retrieved from books and computers
  • Read a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences independently
  • Enjoy an increasing range of books
  • Explore and experiment with sounds, words and texts

Writing

  • Use writing as a means of recording and communicating
  • Attempt writing for different purposes, using features of different forms such as lists, stories and instructions
  • Write their own names and other things such as labels and captions, and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation
  • Begin to break the flow of speech into words
  • Use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words

Handwriting

  • Use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable letters, most of which are correctly formed
  • Begin to form recognisable letters
  • Begin to use anticlockwise movement and retrace vertical lines