Before learning to add, children need to be able to move beyond rote counting to understanding number values. For example, does your child know what two apples look like? How about four?

First try to make use of daily opportunities to encourage your son to count out objects. For example, you could line up five empty boxes and label them with the numbers one to five. Your son could then find one toy to go in the box marked one, two to go in the box marked two and so on. Assembled together, these could form a number train. Once he has plenty of practise counting out objects of up to ten, having him practise adding on one. Again do this in a practical way, so that he can use manipulatives to see what actually happens to a group of objects when we add on one more. Once he has grasped this, Provide opportunities to allow him to practise adding on two and so on. Tackling addition this way, rather than having your son launch into a whole lot of written mixed addition problems, will help him to understand the concept of addition more easily.

Furthermore, using hands-on materials will allow him to completely understand the how addition works and will make the operation a concrete, tangible idea rather than something abstract. Later, once he has grasped the concept of addition in a practical way, you can introduce the symbolic representations of addition sums (eg. 4 + 3). Don't worry about your child using his fingers as counting tools: fingers are simply another manipulative, just like counters, and furthermore they are always at the ready! Finally, when teaching addition to your son, get him into the habit of counting on. Many children will add 4 + 3 by counting all the way from 1. Your child should learn the method of putting the largest of the two numbers in his head then counting on from there, in this case putting 4 in his head and then counting on three more to arrive at 7. This is a much more efficient and effective way of adding two numbers together.

Many parents believe that a child who uses the pictures in a book to help her decode the words is cheating! We should then ask ourselves what the pictures are there for? In using the pictures to help tell the story, your daughter is showing that she understands that the pictures help convey meaning. Furthermore, it is very common for emergent readers to memorise simple story books, and indeed some can even read the book without looking at the pages at all! Again this is all part of emergent reading. Your child has learnt that the book conveys information but is not really looking at the individual words at this stage.

Encourage your daughter to continue to use the picture clues to help her memorise simple sentences. In addition, try showing her how to track words from left to right across the page using her finger to demonstrate the link between the spoken and the written word. Play simple word matching games using a few selected common words taken from the story and printed clearly onto cards. Look for words that recur in the book and see how many times you can find that word together. Through sharing books and playing frequent words games, you will find that your daughter will learn how to apply her knowledge of letter sounds and common words to reading.

Many three year olds suffer from separation anxiety. Your son is familiarizing himself with a new environment and will soon begin to feel more comfortable as he develops relationships with his peers and teachers. Keep goodbyes short and relaxed, assuring him that you will return at the end of the class. After class each day, discuss positive aspects of his experiences in school and give him lots of praise and encouragement to boost his confidence in managing the situation. Liaise closely with your son's class teachers and work together to make the transition from home to school easier. For example, if your son's teacher knows about things your son is afraid of or dislikes, she will be better equipped to avoid distressing situations for him and to make his school experiences positive.

Finally, make sure that you, as a parent, are comfortable and happy with your choice of pre-school. Spend time looking around the school and getting to know the teachers. Often separation anxiety stems from the parent who is understandably worried by leaving her young one in the hands of strangers. Children are very sensitive to this type of anxiety in their parents and it can rub off on them. If you are happy and relaxed when your child goes to school, it is much more likely that your son will be happy and relaxed too.

Phonics is taught as part of our comprehensive reading and spelling programme at Lorna Whiston Pre-School and the children are introduced to the initial letter sounds usually half way through Nursery 2. In K1 this initial knowledge of phonics is consolidated and developed as the children move on to working with blends, digraphs and so on, and this is further reinforced in K2, where the children explore even more complex phonics such as three-letter blends and vowel digraphs.

In recent years there has been a trend for introducing aspects of language such as phonics very early on. However research suggests that this “the earlier the better” trend is not actually beneficial to children’s learning, and that children who are introduced to phonics very early on are no better at reading or spelling than children who start work with phonics a little later. Indeed an over-emphasis on phonics at the emergent reading stage has been shown, in some cases, to impede reading fluency, as the child tries to decode each word she encounters in the text phonetically, rather than reading the whole word as a single sense unit.

The concept of a letter having a sound, or often several sounds, which are often different from their letter names and which, in combination with other letters, produce different sounds and meanings, is cognitively complex. Thus, during Nursery 1 and the first part of Nursery 2, we concentrate on exposing the children to a wide range of books and on nurturing a love of reading then we gradually introduce phonics as a reading and spelling tool which children can use, along with many other tools, to break down, build up and decoded words.