She talked about the importance of teaching visual discrimination skills, starting with name recognition. A way to do this with New Entrants is to put names on children's coat hooks with velcro and jumble them up each day. Another is to use a smart tray for matching images.
Yolanda talked about the most important words to start with - the ones she starts with are: the, is, my, go, I, to, like, mum and dad.
She says that when she introduces a new word she puts it on a card and moves the card around to make sure that the child's eyes are tracking.
She says 'touch it/see it/say it.'
She showed a word ladder that she uses to introduce new words every day before her big book. This has a couple of words on it (not alternating) and the children read the words as they go up and down the ladder.
Yolanda then went through the approach she uses in her programme, showing example lessons on Youtube. I have bought the book so will make up a kit and try the programme out.
A big emphasis of this course was on praise. Yolanda got us to watch some of her sample lessons and count the number of times she gave out specific praise. She gave out praise even for sitting carefully on the chair. This obviously helped to create a positive environment for learning the words.
Takeaway: I will pay attention to the frequency and specific nature of the praise that I give out at reading time. In the next holidays I will make up an Early Words kit and test out the programme. For children that are really struggling to learn the high-frequency words, this approach that introduces them gradually sounds like a good idea.
