Phonics in Nursery: What Actually Happens Before Letters

Phonics in nursery is almost entirely listening, not letters. Long before a child is shown that the sound "s" is written with the letter s, they spend months tuning their ear: hearing rhythm and rhyme, noticing the sound a word starts with, and pushing spoken sounds back together into a whole word. In the programmes English schools use, this stage is called Phase 1, or the Lilac band, or Level 1. It looks like games, singing and silly noises, because that is exactly what it is.

What is my child actually doing in a nursery phonics session?

Mostly playing with sound. The 2007 Letters and Sounds framework, which most later schemes borrowed their numbering from, puts no letters at all in Phase 1. The content is listening, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and oral blending. Twinkl Phonics describes its Level 1 in almost the same terms: environmental sounds, rhythm, rhyme, oral blending and segmenting. Bug Club Phonics calls its first band Lilac and puts no letters in it either, just listening, rhythm and rhyme.

So a session might be a rhyming song, a guessing game about what made a noise behind a screen, a story read three times because the children asked, or an adult saying "I spy something beginning with mmm". None of it looks like reading. All of it is.

Does it matter which scheme the nursery follows?

Far less than it will later. The stage before letters is remarkably similar wherever you look, and the names are most of the difference.

Once letters begin, the programmes diverge sharply in order and in vocabulary, and it starts to matter a great deal which one your child's school uses. Before that, the ear work is close to interchangeable. If you want to see how the later stages line up, the phase-by-phase breakdown is a useful map.

What is oral blending, and why do people keep mentioning it?

Oral blending is the whole of reading in miniature, with the hard part removed. An adult says a word in separate sounds, "c-u-p", and the child says "cup". There is no print, nothing to look at, no letters to decode. The child is practising the exact mental move that reading will later demand.

A child who can already blend sounds they hear will usually blend sounds they read within a few weeks of meeting the letters. A child who cannot yet do it by ear finds the letters much heavier going, because they are being asked to learn two new things at once: what the letters say, and what to do with them.

It costs nothing to practise and needs no resources. Ask for the "c-u-p" when you want the cup fetched. Say "put on your h-a-t" at the front door. Do three words, get them right, stop. If your child looks blank, say the word normally straight afterwards so the game never becomes a test.

Do I need to teach letters before Reception?

No. Reception teachers plan on the assumption that the letters are new, and they teach them fast. Little Wandle, for instance, introduces s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f l across the first half of the autumn term, then ff ll ss j v w x y z zz qu ch sh th ng nk in the second. Read Write Inc teaches its Set 1 single letters in the order m a s d t i n p g o c k u b f e l h r j v y w z x. Jolly Phonics opens with Group 1, s a t i p n, each sound with its own action and song.

A child who arrives already knowing a handful of letters is not ahead in any way that lasts a term. A child who arrives able to hear that sun and sock start the same way genuinely is better placed, and that costs you nothing but conversation.

How do I say the sounds without getting them wrong?

This is the one thing genuinely worth getting right, and it takes about a minute to learn. Say the sound cleanly, with no "uh" on the end. "mmm", not "muh". The parent guidance published for Essential Letters and Sounds sorts them into two groups: bouncy sounds, b d g k p and t, said short and crisp; and stretchy sounds, m s f l n r v and z, which you can hold on for as long as you like.

It matters because "cuh-a-tuh" does not blend into cat. It blends into something closer to "cuhatuh", and a four year old has no reliable way of turning that back into a word. Clean sounds make blending obvious. Muddy ones make it a puzzle.

What about letter names and the alphabet song?

Both are fine and neither is urgent. Early phonics teaching works in sounds rather than names, because sounds are what you blend. Sounds-Write makes the point explicitly by starting from the sounds in spoken words and asking how each one is written, so children talk about "sounds" and "spellings" rather than about letters. Read Write Inc gives the same idea a character: Fred the frog speaks only in sounds, Fred says c-a-t and the children say cat.

If your child already sings the alphabet and loves it, carry on. Just do not expect it to help with blending, because it is a different kind of knowledge.

What about writing letters?

Nursery writing is mostly about control of the hand rather than spelling. Chalk, dough, threading, painting, drawing, big loops on a steamy window: all of it feeds the grip and the strength that letter formation needs later. If your child wants to write their name, help them, and let it be messy. Nobody in Reception is going to hold a wobbly capital against them.

My child's nursery does not seem to do phonics at all. Is that a problem?

Usually not. A great deal of Phase 1 work does not announce itself: the rhyming stories, the songs with actions, the sound-guessing games and the endless talking are the work. If you want to know, ask the key person what they do for rhyme, listening and oral blending, and you will normally find it is already happening under other names.

If the answer is genuinely nothing, the home version is easy and cheap: rhyme, sing, talk, and read aloud. You do not need a scheme to do any of it.

Nursery phonics is not a head start on Reception. It is the ear work that makes Reception possible.

What helps most in the year before school?

Five things, in rough order of value.

• Read aloud every day, from books far harder than anything your child could read alone. This builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, which decoding practice does not touch.
• Rhyme deliberately. Nursery rhymes, silly rhyming pairs, "what rhymes with cat". Rhyme awareness is one of the clearest early signals that a child is hearing the inside of words.
• Play oral blending games in the gaps: the car, the stairs, the bath. Two or three words at a time.
• Talk more than you think you need to. Naming things, explaining things, telling them about your day. Vocabulary is the quiet half of reading.
• Let them see you read. Anything counts, including the football results.

Notice what is not on the list: flashcards, workbooks, and any kind of formal session at a table. None of those are wrong, exactly, but they buy far less than a story and a chat, and they cost a lot more goodwill.

What happens once the letters start?

Quite a lot, quite quickly, and then the books come home. The first ones are short, plain and deliberately easy, because they are matched to the handful of sounds your child has actually been taught. That match is the entire point, and it is worth understanding before the first book bag appears: what decodable books are and why they look so dull covers it properly.

By Year 1 the same child will be working on alternative spellings for sounds they already know, and the books will look much more like stories. If you want to see where the road goes, the Year 1 picture is the next stop.

Before you worry

Almost everything parents ask about nursery phonics turns out to be a question about timing, and the answer is nearly always that there is more time than it feels like. Children arrive in Reception knowing wildly different amounts and the gap closes fast, because the teaching is systematic and it starts from the beginning for everyone. If something is genuinely nagging at you, particularly about hearing or speech, it is worth raising with the nursery or your GP rather than sitting with it.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Letters and Sounds, Bug Club, Twinkl Phonics, Read Write Inc, Little Wandle, Jolly Phonics, Essential Letters and Sounds or Sounds-Write, and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.