What should a successful reader and writer know and be able to do? As a teacher, you need to be able to answer this question so that you can guide your pupils. Learning to read and write successfully takes practice. Therefore, it is important to use a variety of approaches and activities that will keep pupils interested. It is also important to assess pupils’ progress and to ask yourself whether you are meeting their needs. This section explores these ideas as it looks at early literacy.
1. Using songs and rhymes
Learning to read and write is hard work! Because you want pupils to look forward to reading and writing lessons, it is very important that you make your classroom – and the activities that support learning to read and write – as stimulating as possible.
Resource 1: What successful readers and writers need to know explains that pupils need to learn how to connect sounds and letters, letters and words, words and sentences. Songs and rhymes that pupils know well – and to which they can perform actions – help them to make these connections. So does shared reading, in which you read a big print storybook, with pictures,
to your pupils. While you are reading, stop to show them each picture and to ask what they think will happen next. When you have finished, use the book for letter and word recognition activities in which you ask individual pupils to point to and read particular letters and words. Remember to give pupils plenty of opportunities to talk about the story – the characters, what happened, how they feel about the story, etc.
