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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

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Spelling in Reception

Spelling in Reception
How is spelling introduced to Reception-age children? We explain how phonemes and then graphemes are taught in the classroom, and what words children are expected to be able to write by the end of their first year of primary school.

Learning to read means learning to write: reading and spelling in Reception

Step 1: recognising alphabet letters

Children learn to recognise all the letters of the alphabet in Reception, the idea being that any time they are faced with a letter they will be able to make the sound of that letter. 
 

ReadingWriting
Children will be taught letter sounds with a variety of songs, games and age-appropriate activities, for example: a 'lucky dip' where they have to say the sound of a letter they have picked or matching an object to the letter that makes its initial sound. It is vital that they are confident with all their letter sounds before they move onto the next stage, which is putting sounds of letters together to make short words.Reception children need to learn how to form the letters they are learning about.  

They need to start by understanding how a letter is formed and start making these motions themselves. For example: a child learning to form the letter ‘s’ may be given an adult demonstration of how to do this in some sand, and then encouraged to copy. They may also practise using various different media, such as pens on a whiteboard, chalk on a blackboard and pencil on paper. A lot of care and attention is spent on showing children how to correctly hold a pencil. Children will also be taught how to write carefully on lines.

Step 2: blending sounds to make words

By the second term of Reception children begin to learn to ‘blend’ sounds, which means that when shown the word ‘cat’, instead of saying each letter as a separate sound, they are able to blend the sounds together to say the whole word. ‘Cat’ is a CVC word, because it is made up of a consonant, then a vowel, then a consonant. 

Step 3: reading CVC, CCVC and CVCC words

Children will then move onto reading CCVC words such as ‘snap’ and CVCC words such as ‘fast’.

What words do children learn to spell in Reception?

By the end of Reception, children are expected to be able to write one grapheme (written symbol) for each of the phonemes (sounds) in the English language, which are:

The framework for literacy states that Reception children should be able to write ‘simple regular words’. The kinds of words will vary from child to child, but most teachers will aim to have children writing CVC, CCVC and CVCC words by the end of Reception.

Examples of words children might learn to spell in Reception include:
 

  • sat
  • pat
  • shop
  • then
  • slim
  • post
  • sing 
  • milk

A number of high-frequency words and tricky words are also learned in Reception; children are encouraged to learn these words "off by heart" as they're not always phonetically decodable with the phonics skills they have.

Reception spelling worksheets

Look through our selection of Reception spelling worksheets to get hands-on with early spelling learning and try our Reception spelling practice 'tests' to boost your child's confidence with the Look, Cover, Write and Check method.

How spelling is taught in primary school, year by year

Find out what words and spelling patterns children are taught in each year of primary school with our parents' guides: