Launchpad for Literacy

Across the federation we use the Launchpad for Literacy approach. This approach is all about children, the skills they have and the skills they need for all aspects of literacy. It is a skills-based approach, enabling us to:

• improve outcomes in the Early Years and beyond by creating firm foundations for learning and development
• identify and close specific skill gaps with individual children and vulnerable groups, assessing, tracking and quantifying the process of closing the gap.
• identify speech, language and other developmental needs as soon as possible and to embed specific skill-based intervention into classroom practice and ‘Quality First Teaching.’

What might Launchpad for Literacy look like within our schools?

The Launchpad for Literacy approach focuses on what the children can do,

with a greater awareness of development and specific skills. The sharing of books, stories, songs and rhymes continue to be of high importance. Developing all children’s love of reading and early literacy is key.

An informed observer may see and hear within interactions and language enrichment things such as:

• building interaction, listening and engagement and/or two-way communication.
• turn-taking, facilitating two-way interactions or interactions between peers.
• verb vocabulary.
• using language to ask.
• vocabulary expansion and semantic links (words that go together).
• developing key concept vocabulary which will be required for literacy acquisition (e.g. beginning, middle, end, etc.)
• building understanding by considering the amount of language used with different children.
• sentence skills such as using pronouns, past tense verbs or linking sentences together with conjunctions (and, so, because, etc.)

These skills will be targeted during interactions alongside child-initiated learning, daily routines and also the language used within more focussed tasks.

Staff also use the Launchpad to Literacy approach to complement children’s phonological awareness. There are key skills in the Launchpad approach which significantly impact on children's phonic development.

These include:

Developing children's Sequential Auditory Memory

 In order to read a simple three letter word a child must first be able to recall 3 things (they know really well) said orally in sequence, for example, animals (pig, cow, horse).  

Developing children's Visual Discrimination

The ability to identify similarities and differences of shapes and this includes letters.