What’s wrong with letters in a sand tray?

Early phonics and reading in context – bye-bye Letters and Sounds

Many teaching staff and senior leaders over the last 2 years have experienced a significant shift in phonics and early reading practice. In April 2021 the Department for Education released a guidance document with core criteria for teaching phonics and early reading. This document informed primary schools that the last phonics scheme published by the DfE in 2007, Letters and Sounds, was not going to support early phonics and reading, due to its lack of training, guidance, support and resources. The key point for many teachers was that the Letters and Sounds programme was now seen as insufficient and unsuitable. Information about how companies, schools and individuals could apply to be a validated scheme provider that adhered to the core criteria were made at this time.

This sent some schools into a spin, just like wildfire, panic creates more panic and it was clear from discussion with schools and on social media that the guidance, or at least the diluted version floating around amongst some practitioners, had hit a nerve. Although the panic was not helpful, it was clear that all teachers had their children’s best interests at heart. The guidance, in a nutshell, wanted schools to be teaching phonics and early reading systematically, so that all children could meet the expected standard for the Phonics Screening Check and show themselves to be fluent readers at the end of Key stage 1.

Setting up reading and phonics activities

With the changes described above and the publication of The Reading Framework (July 2021 and January 2022) and the Revised Reading Framework guidance (2023) not only has phonics teaching and early reading been rebranded, but the way that practitioners incorporate phonics into their provision in early years has also changed.

For many practitioners over the years, phonics and early reading has been incorporated into day to day practice through enhanced or continuous provision. When I think back to my own practice, I know that I put letters into the sand tray and the water tray, I had graphemes and tricky words around my outside area, even groovy oversized foam ones on the wall. I had a cvc (consonant vowel consonant) fishing game that the children could use to practise their blending outside, and inside I had cvc pictures and magnetic letters to build the words. I could use these to ensure that I got observations on the children who were developing their phonics knowledge independently. They were not going to do any phonics unless I put these resources out for them, they were too busy in their play reaching that zone of proximal development. This supported the completion of the early years profile of my children, as well as termly and end of year moderation and my teacher assessment. The perfect assessment cycle…or so I thought.

On reflection I have realised that the only way I was able to see children applying their phonics knowledge was when I sat alongside them, showing them how to use the resources. This was not child initiated and the children were not accessing the resources independently. Over the years I have seen numerous phonics and early reading activities being provided for children in early years settings including trays with sand or paint for children to form the grapheme being taught, painting over an image of a robot because you just learnt the grapheme ‘r’, laminated graphemes in the shape of the class theme e.g. boats, shells, houses, beautifully placed into a tuff spot then photographed for posterity, these were then added to the environment, and worksheets where children colour in the grapheme or play dough mats with the grapheme, encouraging children to make specific words out of dough. Children will read these and that is part of their daily practice of phonics throughout the day…isn’t it? The Reading Framework (July 23) has a subheading, titled activities that hinder learning. In this section (p.57) the importance of reading practise is highlighted and well planned activities are recommended to ensure that the children recognise the activity is teaching them to read and spell words and sentences.

Why are letters in a sand tray a bad thing?

You could argue that the provision that I have described above is well planned and practitioners do have a reading and spelling focus, it’s on the provision plan, there is a learning outcome, you have used your current data to close the phonics learning gap. My experience over the last 20 years has led me to think more about who I’m setting up the provision for…

– Is this setup/resource really for the children?
– Are the children going to interact with these resources independently and creatively?
– Is it going to challenge all children?
– Will this learning resource support and develop talk?
– Is the learning engaging and fun?
– Will this resource remain on my continuous provision all year?
– What will change over the year?

Insufficient and misguided early years subject knowledge cannot be ignored…

– Is the class teacher an early career teacher (ECT) or generally new to early years?
– Are teachers simply mirroring practice they have seen on previous placements or previous schools?
– Is the tsunami of beautifully curated images on social media influencing early years practice?
– Does the class teacher need support and guidance on good practice?
– Do practitioners understand the value of child initiated learning?
– Are we just trying to make phonics provision explicit to teaching assistants, subject leaders, senior leaders, Governors, improvement partners or Ofsted?
– Does our phonics provision create a language rich learning environment?

How can we teach reading better?

Firstly, in order to develop early reading skills we need to appreciate the power of child initiated learning and how this time can be used to develop social and emotional development, active listening and attention, early language and talk. The activity/setup in the sand tray that I described earlier is more suited to the development of early language than early reading, we have all seen children turn a so-called phonics activity into a role play or small world game, full of rich language and imagination e.g. the stones in the sand tray become rocks that are being picked up by the digger, the children do not mention the grapheme on them at all. Adults might try to crowbar the graphemes into the play which will switch children’s interests and engagement entirely off phonics and reading.

Embedding early phonics and reading into your everyday practice requires daily direct teaching of systematic synthetic phonics, making a strong start in reception and starting at the beginning of term 1. With the guidance of an adult, children will be supported, so that mistakes and misconceptions can be corrected including the articulation of letter sounds, accurate segmenting, and blending, this cannot be underestimated.

How can we really embed phonics?

Ensure that the recapping of phonics throughout the day is part of your daily routine. Consider the following…

– Has your class got positive learning behaviours?
– Can they listen and respond?
– Consider practising oral blending through oral segmenting e.g. Simon says touch your t-oe-s…toes.
– Refer to phonics learning throughout the day during teacher directed activities, stories, rhymes, poems, songs and during interactions e.g. “P for potato, that was the grapheme we were learning about this morning”.

Formative assessment during phonics and early reading is essential. If you notice a child struggling to keep up with the rest of the group/class, don’t ignore this until the end of the term, support that child on the day by recapping the grapheme learnt or if the gap is larger, support the child through a small group intervention to keep up, and be able to progress their learning.