Reception Classroom Kit

The Letters & Sounds Reception Classroom Kit provides a complete teaching solution for your phonics instruction in your Reception classroom. Central to the programme is the Teacher Planner, which includes weekly and daily lesson plans according to the progression as you move through phases 2, 3 and 4 of Letters and Sounds. A handy calendar at the front links the progression to the school term weeks, and there are also trackers for the decodable readers so that they can be easily matched to lesson plans.

Within the kit there are 6 x 216 different decodable reader titles. Each decodable reader has the progression printed inside the front cover and where the particular title sits within the progression. It also shows the Common Exception Words (or tricky words) that are included in the book, so that children can practise them before reading the text. There are 12 different titles with each set and multiple sets are included covering: fiction, non-fiction, hi-lo and science. Finally, there is an additional set of Read & Write decodables that allow children to practise their newly developing decoding skills into their writing.

Two friezes are included for classroom decoration. One for teaching the letter sounds of phases 2 and 3, and the other for introducing the alphabet at phases 3 and teaching both uppercase and lowercase letters.

A number of other supplementary resources that go with the Teacher Planner are included and these are referenced across daily lessons. The kit includes 3 sets of Rainbow Phonics magnetic letters. These magnetic letters are colour-coded around their phonemes and are also joined to represent digraphs (and trigraphs) as one unit of sound. Every daily lesson in the Teacher Planner has a table with quick reference to words that can be built at that stage according to the progression.

Lessons themselves are typically introduced with the phonemic awareness example of the phoneme of interest. The phonemic awareness cards provide these examples for each lesson and cleverly references the lesson number and card number in the back corners for easy cross reference. This is common throughout the supplementary resources.

The GPC cards (grapheme to phoneme cards) are central to the programme and these provide an easy to remember mnemonic so that children can grasp a newly introduced letter sound along with handwriting formation on the back of the card where appropriate.

Common exception word cards provide examples of the common exception words that run parallel to the progression. Unique to this programme are sound speech marks that help children correctly identify the tricky part of the word. There are also high frequency word cards that don’t contain tricky elements and phoneme frame cards for daily practice. Both card sets have a write and wipe surface so that they can also be used for handwriting practice.

Finally, alien word cards are provided so that a nonsense word can be introduced daily (according to the progression) and decoded. These cards can also be used alongside the various assessments provided in the planner and throughout the programme.