Foundations of Literacy: seven strands of practice

Learning to listen: discrimination of foreground sounds against background noise; discrimination of a widening range of sounds; developing aural attention span; social listening skills, including making eye contact and attending to the speaker; mental imaging; development of auditory memory.

Time to talk: compensation for language delay, including expansion and ‘pole-bridging’ talk; social speech skills, including awareness of audience and turn-taking; vocabulary development; imitation of and innovation upon sentence structures; development of language to explain, explore, plan, predict, recall, report and analyse.

Music, movement and memory: development of rhythm, beginning with the ability to hold a steady beat; speech and listening skills as above, especially articulation and voice control, turn-taking, singing in time with others and development of auditory memory; physical coordination and motor control; left-right brain interaction.

Storytime: speech and listening skills as above, especially social skills and development of auditory memory; familiarity with written language patterns, story grammar and prediction skills.

Learning about print: awareness of the nature and functions of print; knowledge of the alphabet letters; concepts about reading and writing; emergent reading and writing; knowledge of essential sight words.

Tuning into sound: listening skills and general language awareness; awareness of rhyme, rhythm and alliteration (phonological awareness); phonemic awareness, including blending and segmenting; phonic knowledge, including the alphabet code.

Moving into writing: all the above skills and knowledge; refinement of motor control from large scale to fine control and hand-eye coordination; basic letter shape formation; development of the finger muscles; pencil grip and control.

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