Give your child (or a child you care for) an excellent head start in literacy. This course will give parents and carers the knowledge they need to teach the basics of reading and writing at home. You’ll learn how to support literacy development for babies and toddlers under 3, it’s important to start this early by reading simple books to under 3’s and encourage a love of stories, also for them to make marks with crayons and paint as a pre-writing skill. You will learn the meaning of phonics, how to teach letter sounds once your child is in school, blending and segmenting and also tricky words. They will also be writing letters and words at the same time as reading. It’s important to strengthen a child’s fingers (their fine motor skills) to enable them to hold a pencil and write. Once your child has mastered these, they will learn how to read and blend digraphs and about Magic ‘e’. It is suggested that this is taught alongside literacy teaching in school, and for you to follow along and reinforce what your child is learning in school. This course will hopefully give you confidence to teach literacy effectively at home.

Who this course is for:

• Parents, carers, teaching assistants, nannies, anyone working with young children