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Q: Should I try to teach my child to read before they go to school? A: Although you want to give your child a head start, evidence suggests that pressurising children to read or learn about numbers in a formal way can in fact be counter-productive. The best thing to do is to let them discover and learn at their own pace in an unstructured way - but you can encourage them to develop the right skills to prepare them for school. For more information see About School: Helping with literacy and numeracy Q: What are the 100 words that primary schools use for testing pupils' reading/understanding?
David Lewis, Pontypridd A: There is a definite pattern of learning for primary school children when they're learning to read, concentrating on specified learning sounds and reading patterns, as follows: Progression in phonic skills and knowledge:
Step skill in:
- hearing and discriminating general sounds, speech sounds and patterns
- hearing phonemes /s/, /m/, /k/, /t/, /g/, /h/, in initial position
- hearing phonemes /s/, /m/, /k/, /t/, /g/, in final position
- hearing phonemes /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, in medial position; blending and segmenting, reading and spelling
Knowledge of letters:
s, m, c, t, g, h
ss, ck, l, n, d, k, sh, ch
a, e, i, o, u, f, qu, b, r, j, p, th, ng
v, w, x, y, z
ai, ee, ie, oa, oo, or, ir, oi, ou
ay, a-e, ea, igh, y, i-e, ow, o-e, oe, ew,
ue, u-e, oy, ow, er, ur, aw, air, ear, oo
For a list of the words that the National Literacy Strategy use as an initial word list for children, see page 29 of the downloadable PDF, Spelling Bank, Word Level section of the National Literacy Strategy website |
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