Experts in pre-reading and early learning
Camel Series
Pre-reading Skills
Before any child can pick up a book and start reading there are a multitude of skills they need to acquire to ensure a solid foundation to build on.
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Most children listen to stories read to them by their parents and this helps to develop their listening and speaking skills. From an early age, children mimic the sounds they can hear in their environment for example animal sounds or vehicle sounds. These are the fundamental building blocks to develop their auditory skills, which are needed to differentiate between the different phonetic sounds they will hear once they start with a formal reading programme at their school.
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Alongside their listening and understanding skills, your child is also developing their speaking skills. The more you interact with your child the more their vocabulary and knowledge of the world around them develops.
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That is why the Camel Level 1 books only have illustrations so that children can learn the following skills as outlined in the National Curriculum
1. How to handle and hold a book
Your child will learn how to look at books independently while holding the book the correct way up and turning the pages carefully. They will learn that in English we read the books from left to right.
2. What happens inside a book?
Your child will start to show an interest in the illustrations and might make up their own story based on what they can see. They’ll start describing the settings, events, and characters that are in the story and slowly begin to realise how stories are structured. Once they are confident telling their own stories about the illustrations they might even start to predict what happens next or make up their own endings for the stories.
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3. When will my child start to read?
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If your child follows a phonics program at school they’ll start to understand that printed words carry meaning and will show more awareness of familiar words and signs such as their own name and advertising logos. They might recognise stand-alone letters in the titles of the books they read and will get very excited when they see the same letters that appear in their names.
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The illustrations in our books are colourful and lend themselves to opportunities to ask questions about what your child sees and what they think might be happening in the story. They are given a chance to relate to the familiar scenes, places, and landmarks that they discover between the pages of the books. This helps to motivate them to interact with the story and give their own unique perspective of what is happening.
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We hope you enjoy the books in the Camel Series with your child while developing their communication and language skills.
Sea Turtle / Fox / Dugong
What is the difference between a letter and a pure sound?
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One of the first Nursery Rhymes toddlers learn is the ABC song. Parents are so proud of their children when they can recite and recognise all the letters of the alphabet and often they overlook the very important next step. When your child recites the letters of the alphabet they are only saying the names of the letters and are not linking the letter shape to a specific sound yet.
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Once your child starts with a formal phonics program at school they’ll be taught that each letter makes a specific sound. The English Alphabet can be very confusing, especially for children who are not native speakers.
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Take the letter ‘c’ for example. You have the 'c' in cat and the 'c' in cinema – both words start with the same letter but are pronounced differently. The same happens with the letter ‘i’. You have the 'i' in ink and the 'i' in ice – again both words start with the same letter but are pronounced differently.
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There are many different phonics programs followed in schools, but they all use similar phonetic skills to assist your child in learning how to blend sounds (put sounds together) to form a word.
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What are CVC and High Frequency Words?
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The stories in the Sea Turtle Series have been carefully written with one goal in mind – to give your child the chance to be able to read every single word independently because they are using pure sounds to blend and read the words.
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Once your child knows their pure sounds they will be able to read any CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word by simply blending the sounds together to form a word.
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c-a-t becomes cat because they can hear and differentiate between the different pure sounds.
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h-o-t becomes hot, b-e-d becomes bed, and so on and so forth.
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Along with CVC words your child will learn how to read High Frequency Words. These words cannot always be blended together using pure sounds and are words that are found in almost every sentence your child reads.
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One of the first High Frequency words (HF) your child will be taught is the word ‘I’ often followed by the word ‘the’.
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In the Sea Turtle Series, words and sentences are often repeated to ensure your child practices their new skill of blending. Their confidence in their own reading abilities gets a massive boost as they are able to read complete sentences with very little help.
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The Fox and Dugong series provide stories with much longer sentences and short paragraphs. All the words are still phonetically decodable and easy to read.
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Comprehension skills are developed by asking your child a variety of questions about the text. Include questions that are challenging their reasoning skills where the answers need to be thought about instead of finding a straightforward answer in the text.
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Thank you for choosing Shifting Sands Learning.
