To the letter

On the journey to becoming a successful reader, children pass through many stages in their learning. In the early development of phonics, it is crucial that children be afforded plenty of opportunities to listen to, and discriminate between, the sounds around them before they are ready to hear sounds in words.

To provide children with appropriate experiences and support in this area, practitioners must understand the aspects and stages of learning. They must also recognise the futility of an overemphasis on formal teaching of letter sounds before children have developed these basic sound discrimination skills.

Many of the normal activities already going on in an early years setting will offer opportunities for listening to and identifying a variety of sounds.

Musical instruments

Musical instruments should be readily available to children. Exploring these will encourage them to discuss the various sounds that they produce.

Playing an instrument behind your back and asking children to guess what it is can help to heighten their aural awareness.

A song with instrumental accompaniment and hand-clapping, finger-clicking or the stamping of feet is great fun and a valuable activity for developing children's ability to discriminate between sounds.

Rhythm and rhyme

Nursery rhymes and playground chants introduce children to rhythm and rhyme, and they will quickly begin to repeat these by themselves. Young children need to be active in their learning and should have opportunities to respond expressively to music and sound through movement as well as joining in marching chants and action rhymes.

There are many books available to help develop children's awareness of rhythm and rhyme (see 'Books' below). These should be included when equipping book areas and planning story sessions. With plenty of experiences of nursery rhymes and rhyming stories, children will build the necessary skills to create or continue rhyming strings (such as dog, bog, log). These may also include 'nonsense' words.

Experiments with rhyme can often be hilarious. Young children often enjoy helping to change well-known nursery rhymes - for example, 'Baa baa black sheep, have you any cheese? Yes sir, yes sir, three lumps please!'

In the environment

Indoors and outdoors, children will be able to hear and talk about lots of sounds - doors banging, taps dripping, car engines revving, dogs barking, footsteps on stairs.

Children enjoy making audiotapes of sounds that they hear, then playing the tapes and trying to identify the sounds.

Simple games can be devised to focus children on listening and hearing. For example, place a series of objects behind a small screen and ask the children to guess what is making the sound.

Voice

Children need to be aware of, and able to discriminate between, different speech sounds as well as more general sounds. Therefore, practitioners should encourage them to:

* experiment with their own voices to find out about the range of sounds that they can produce - you can test the louder noises outdoors.

* explore their voices freely during play. For example, as children pretend to go up to the moon in a rocket they might say 'Whoosh!' or, as they push the train around the track, they might make a rhythmic 'chi-choo, chi-choo'

sound.

* explore animal sounds through imaginative play and games.

Alliteration

Alliteration is an area that can be explored with young children through rhymes, songs and tongue-twisters. For example, 'Five fat sausages sizzling in the pan.' The phrase 'sizzling sausages' could then be used in other contexts such as making sausages in the dough area or pretending to have a barbeque in the outdoor area.

Many activities offer a chance to make up alliterative jingles. For example, 'paint puddles on the pink paper' during work in the creative area.

Many story books and rhymes include some intentional alliteration, such as The Blue Balloon and Billy's Beetle.

Giving nursery toys names such as Happy Harry or Blue Bear gives children regular opportunities to hear and use alliteration.

As children's sound discrimination skills develop, they will begin to be able to identify the sound at the beginning of a word. For example, they will tell you that 'cat' starts with 'c'. Children may be able to think of other words that start with the same sound as their name - for example, Tom, tap, tiger, tea.

Letters

At this stage it is appropriate to talk with children about the letters that represent the sounds (see the Nursery Topics poster of Kipper's A to Z).

Again, books can offer opportunities to focus on initial sounds. The Great Pet Sale is a good example: on the perch in the pet shop were 'Things beginning with P. A pelican, a puffin, a penguin, a parrot and a platypus!'

As children's phonological awareness increases, practitioners should support their learning in the context of their self-initiated play. They can also plan suitable games that help to consolidate and extend the children's learning.

Circle games

Here are some suggestions for small-group circle games, but it must be emphasised that these are only appropriate if the children are ready to identify initial sounds in words and are able to recognise a simple rhyme.

(A puppet can be used to engage children and also to model skills and give examples.)

* Place a large hoop in the centre of the circle with, say, an 's'

displayed inside. Pass around a bag containing items beginning with the 's'

sound, such as snake, sausage and sock. Ask each child to take an item from the bag, say its name and place it in the hoop. Listen for the 's' sound with the other children. Next time, include in the bag items that begin with letters other than 's' so that children have to decide which item should and shouldn't go in the hoop.

* Start with an item such as a sock. Pass the item around the circle and, as each child holds it, ask them to think of a rhyming word such as 'lock'

or 'rock'. These can be made-up words. Repeat the words to a simple tune and encourage the children to join in.

* Throw a soft ball or bean bag to each child in turn, at the same time emphasising the initial sound in their name, for example, F-F-Fiona, L-L-Liam. Encourage the children to take turns at throwing the ball and to say the initial sound of other children's names.

* Place some items on a tray in the centre of the circle. Say to the children, "I'm thinking of something that starts with 'p'." Ask if anyone can guess what item it is.

* Create an alliterative word chain. For example, the first child says 'car', the second child repeats 'car' and adds another word such as 'cat', the third child repeats the first two words and adds another word, and so on.

* Select two sounds and provide a group of objects all beginning with one of these two sounds. Give each child an item and then, in turn, ask them to swap their item with someone who has an item beginning with the same sound.

Books

* The Hairy Maclary and Slinky Malinki series by Lynley Dodds (various publishers including Puffin Books) - good for developing rhythm and rhyme

* We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen (Walker Books, 5.99) - good for developing rhythm

* Each Peach Pear Plum by Allan Ahlberg (Picture Puffin, 4.99) - good for developing rhythm and rhyme.