How We Teach Literacy
Literacy
Literacy touches and improves almost every part of a child’s life. It opens academic doors, while improving esteem, relationships, empathy, problem solving and so much more. At Roots, literacy is a cornerstone of our education, creating a culture that develops a lifelong love of the written and spoken word.
Phonics
Talk for Writing
Mark Making
Phonics is a research backed way of teaching children to read by connecting sounds with symbols. All our children have stage one phonics classes - they tune into sounds in their environment, distinguish between them, and segment the sounds in words.
Every week, your child’s key group explores one story in depth - they listen to it, discuss the characters, learn the vocabulary, and create story maps so they can retell it. Parents can find out the week’s story on the MarvellousMe! app.
We give children lots of ways to make marks and start to think about their marks as symbols.
Stories and Rhymes
Home Learning Pack
Home Library
Children engage with words at every opportunity - through stories, rhymes, non-fiction and words in the world. They learn to connect writing and speaking, and understand that print carries meaning.
If your child is finding one topic or skill especially hard, they can take home a learning pack to build up their confidence in these areas
Every child at Roots gets five books a year to keep, so they can make their own home library. We share a video of our practitioners reading the book and guide you on how to bring the book alive with related learning activities, so you can reinforce skills and vocabulary at home.
Story Sack
Family Book Shed
Every fortnight, children take home a ‘story sack’ - bags of high quality books, props and resources to enhance reading, encourage storytelling and foster a love of words.
Our book shed is a little library of books for the whole family - little ones, older siblings and grown-ups! Open every day, all year round, we encourage everyone to borrow and create a strong culture of reading at home.