Have confidence to speak to others about their own wants and interests.
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.
Extend vocabulary, especially by grouping and naming.
Use vocabulary and forms of speech that are increasingly influenced by their experience of books.
Link statements and stick to a main theme or intention.
Consistently develop a simple story, explanation or line of questioning.
Use language for an increasing range of purposes.
Use simple grammatical structures.
Interact with others, negotiating plans and activities and taking turns in conversation.
Enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language, and readily turn to it in their play and learning.
Sustain attentive listening, responding to what they have heard with relevant comments, questions or actions.
Listen with enjoyment, and respond to stories, songs and other music, rhymes and poems and make up their own stories, songs, rhymes and poems.
Extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words.
Speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control and show awareness of the listener.
Children's readiness to engage in conversation.
Children's awareness of conventions, such as taking turns to talk.
How children link statements to develop stories and explanations.
The purposes for which children use talk, for example, to gain attention or to resolve disagreements.
How children concentrate on what others say and their responses to what they have heard.
Rhymes and songs children know by heart.
Children's made-up songs.
Children's growing vocabulary.
The occasions when children speak clearly and confidently and show awareness of the listener.
Encourage conversation with others and demonstrate appropriate conventions: turn-taking, waiting until someone else has finished, listening to others and using expressions such as "please", "thank you" and "can I...?". At the same time, respond sensitively to social conventions used at home.
Show children how to use language for negotiating, by saying "May I...?", "Would it be all right...?", "I think that..." and "Will you...?" in your interactions with them.
Model language appropriate for different audiences, for example, a visitor.
Encourage children to predict possible endings to stories and events.
Encourage children to experiment with words and sounds, for example, in nonsense rhymes.
Encourage children to sort, group and sequence events in their play, using words such as: first, last, next, before, after, all, most, some, each, every.
Encourage language play, for example, through stories such as 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' and action songs that require intonation.
Value children's contributions and use them to inform and shape the direction of discussions.
Give time for children to initiate discussions from shared experiences and have conversations with each other.
Give thinking time for children to decide what they want to say and how they will say it.
Set up collaborative tasks, for example, construction, food activities or story-making through role-play. Help children to talk about and plan how they will begin, what parts each will play and what materials they will need.
Provide opportunities for talking for a wide range of purposes, for example, to present ideas to others as descriptions, explanations, instructions or justifications, and to discuss and plan individual or shared activities.
Foster children's enjoyment of spoken and written language by providing interesting and stimulating play opportunities.
Provide word banks and writing resources for both indoor and outdoor play.
Resource role-play areas with listening and writing equipment and provide easy access to word banks.
Provide opportunities for children to participate in meaningful speaking and listening activities. For example, taking models that they have made to show children in another class and explaining how they were made.
Writing a letter - In a nursery class, children explore writing materials, commenting on the marks they have made. [transcript]
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Language for Thinking
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.
Begin to make patterns in their experience through linking cause and effect, sequencing, ordering and grouping.
Begin to use talk to pretend imaginary situations.
Use language to imagine and recreate roles and experiences.
Use talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events.
How children use talk to reflect upon, clarify, sequence and think about present and past experiences, ideas and feelings.
How children link one thing to another to explain and anticipate things. For example, "We won't play out today because it's too windy... you might get blown away".
Ways in which children use language in their pretend and imaginary play.
For children speaking languages other than English, note which language is dominant, as well as their use of gesture and intonation to convey meaning.
Ask children to think in advance about how they will accomplish a task. Talk through and sequence the stages together.
Use stories from books to focus children's attention on predictions and explanations, for example, "Why did the boat tip over?".
Help children to identify patterns, for example, what generally happens to 'good' and 'wicked' characters at the end of stories; to draw conclusions, "The sky has gone dark. It must be going to rain"; to explain effect, "It sank because it was too heavy"; to predict, "It might not grow in there if it is too dark" and to speculate, "What if the bridge falls down?".
Take an interest in what and how children think and not just what they know.
Set up displays that remind children of what they have experienced, using objects, artefacts, photographs and books.
Provide for, initiate and join in imaginative play and role-play, encouraging children to talk about what is happening and to act out the scenarios in character.
Linking Sounds and Letters
Continue a rhyming string.
Hear and say the initial sound in words and know which letters represent some of the sounds.
Hear and say sounds in words in the order in which they occur.
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.
Can write a few letters when named and make a good attempt at writing own name.
Can recognise several letters.
Makes attempts at reading familiar words in picture books.
Produces more than half of the consonant sounds accurately.
Produces some consonant blends (for example, 'tr' in tree, 'bl' in blue).
Produces almost all vowel sounds accurately.
Starting to mark two and three syllables in words.
Children's alternative versions of favourite rhymes that draw upon their phonic knowledge.
Children's knowledge of initial sounds at the beginning of words, short vowel sounds within words and endings of words. For example, Ranjit notices the letters in his name whenever he sees them, such as 'j' at the beginning of jam.
How children link sounds to letters and begin to use this knowledge to write words, for example, "Pz cn I hv a d" (Please can I have a drink).
Children's confidence in blending and segmenting and in using grapheme-phoneme knowledge to read and spell regular consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, including consonant digraphs and long vowels.
The ways in which children use their phonic knowledge and the number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences used for reading and writing in a variety of contexts.
How children read simple words by sounding out and blending the phonemes all through the word from left to right.
Talk to children about the letters that represent the sounds they hear at the beginning of their own names and other familiar words. Incorporate these in games.
Demonstrate writing so that children can see spelling in action. Encourage them to apply their own grapheme-phoneme knowledge to what they read and write.
When children are ready (usually by the age of five), provide systematic regular phonics sessions. These should be multi-sensory in order to capture their interests, sustain motivation and reinforce learning.
Ensure that role-play areas encourage writing of signs with a real purpose, for example, a pet shop.
Plan fun activities and games that help children create rhyming strings of real and imaginary words, for example, Maddie, daddy, baddie, laddie.
When practitioners judge that children are ready to begin a programme of systematic phonic work they should refer to the guidance on the EYFS CD-ROM, which can be found in areas of Learning and Development: Communication, Language and Literacy: Early Reading.
This will support practitioners working in the EYFS and beyond to start teaching the phonic knowledge and skills children need to be able to recognise words and read them with fluency by the end of KS1. Practitioners need to make principled professional judgements as to when individual children are ready to start such work. For most children this will be by the age of five.
Reading
Enjoy an increasing range of books.
Know that information can be retrieved from books and computers.
Explore and experiment with sounds, words and texts.
Retell narratives in the correct sequence, drawing on language patterns of stories.
Read a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences independently.
Know that print carries meaning and, in English, is read from left to right and top to bottom.
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.
Children's book choices.
Children's understanding about how information is kept in different places and can be retrieved.
Children's understanding of the elements of stories, for example, Mehmet refers to the 'beginning' and 'end' of a story. He says, "I don't like that ending. I think he should've run away and been happy ever after".
How children use non-fiction books.
The favourite books, songs and rhymes children turn to, to be re-read and enjoyed.
The phonic skills children use in decoding text.
The strategies that children use to read.
The words that children recognise, such as their name and signs such as 'open'.
The confidence with which children use their developing phonic knowledge.
Create imaginary words to describe, for example, monsters or other strong characters in stories and poems.
Discuss and model ways of finding out information from non-fiction texts.
Explain to parents the importance of reading to children, ask about favourite books, and offer book loans.
Help children to identify the main events in a story and to enact stories, as the basis for further imaginative play.
Make story boxes with the children. Practitioners should maximise the opportunities that these reading activities present to reinforce and apply children's developing phonic knowledge and skills, particularly once they have started a programme of systematic phonic work which will enable them to recognise words and read them for meaning. For example, demonstrate using phonics as the prime approach to decode words while children can see the text, for example, using big books.
Encourage children to recall words they see frequently, such as 'welcome', their own and friends' names, 'open' and 'bus stop'.
Play word bingo to develop children's grapheme correspondence, so that they can rapidly decode words.
When practitioners judge that children are ready to begin a programme of systematic phonic work they should refer to the guidance on the EYFS CD-ROM which can be found in areas of Learning and Development: Communication, Language and Literacy: Early Reading. This will support practitioners working in the EYFS and beyond to start teaching the phonic knowledge and skills children need to be able to recognise words and read them with fluency by the end of KS1. Practitioners need to make principled professional judgements as to when individual children are ready to start such work. For most children this will be by the age of five.
Encourage children to add to their first-hand experience of the world through the use of books, other texts and information, and information and communication technology (ICT).
Provide story boards and props which encourage children to talk about the sequence of events and characters in a story.
Provide story sacks and boxes for use in the setting and at home.
Provide varied texts and encourage children to use their phonics knowledge to recognise words.
Provide some simple texts which children can decode to give them confidence and to practise their developing skills.
Provide picture books, books with flaps or hidden words, books with accompanying CDs or tapes, and story sacks.
Writing
Begin to break the flow of speech into words.
Use writing as a means of recording and communicating.
Use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words.
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.
How children use writing to record things or to communicate, for example, Marcus writes "Marcus, fz (Faraz) and tm (Tommy)" on a drawing of himself and his two friends playing together.
Instances of writing for different purposes such as labelling the contents on the outside of a box.
How children make use of phonic knowledge as they attempt to write words and simple sentences, for example, "I went to see fiyuwercs and hat to pc by the hut" (I went to see fireworks and had to park by the hut).
Act as a scribe for children. After they say a sentence, repeat the first part of it, say each word as you write, and include some punctuation.
Encourage children to use their ability to hear the sounds at the beginning of words and then in the order in which they occur through words in their writing.
Play games that encourage children to link sounds to letters and then write the letters and words.
Encourage children to re-read their writing as they write.
Provide materials and opportunities for children to use writing in their play, and create purposes for independent and group writing.
Plan occasions where you can involve children in organising writing, for example, putting recipe instructions in the right order.
Provide word banks and other resources for segmenting and blending to support children to use their phonic knowledge.
Handwriting
Begin to use anticlockwise movement and retrace vertical lines.
Begin to form recognisable letters.
Use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable letters, most of which are correctly formed.
Children's dexterity in using a range of tools in their play and writing.
Children's formation of recognisable letters.
Teach children to form letters correctly, for example, when they label their paintings.
Encourage children to practise letter shapes as they paint, draw and record, and as they write, for example, their names, the names of their friends and family, or captions.
Continue writing practice in imaginative contexts, joining some letters, if appropriate, for example, at, it, on.
Provide a variety of writing tools and paper, indoors and outdoors.
Give children practice in forming letters correctly, for example, labelling their work, making cards and writing notices.
Provide opportunities to write meaningfully, for example, by placing notepads by phones or having appointment cards in the role-play doctor's surgery.
Acknowledgements
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00012-2007CDO-EN