Early literacy, numeracy and the first school skills

The foundations we build

• Name recognition and writing — finding their own name, then writing it; the first piece of literacy that matters in a classroom
• Phonological awareness — rhyme, syllables, first sounds and hearing the sounds inside words; the strongest single predictor of early reading
• Letter and sound knowledge — which letters make which sounds, built gradually and in a useful order
• Print awareness and book handling — that print carries meaning, which way it goes, where a story starts
• Vocabulary and listening — the language base that everything else is built on
• Early numeracy — counting with meaning, recognising small quantities without counting, comparing more and less
• Shape, pattern and sorting — the thinking that mathematics is built from
• Pencil and pre-writing skills — grip, control and the lines and shapes that letters are made from
• Attention for a learning task — sticking with something adult-chosen for a realistic stretch

Signs you might notice

• Not recognising their own name in print by the year before school
• Finding rhyme and syllable games hard when other children are picking them up
• Little interest in books, or difficulty sitting for a short story
• Avoiding drawing, pencils or anything that looks like writing
• Counting by rote but not knowing how many are actually there
• Not picking up letters and sounds despite plenty of exposure
• Educators raising concerns about early learning skills
• An older sibling who found this easy and a noticeable difference with this child

How our early childhood teachers help

Through play, deliberately. Rhyme and sound games in the car, name hunts, cooking for counting and measuring, board games for number sense, shared book reading done in the way that actually builds language rather than just getting to the end. The activity looks ordinary; the targeting underneath it is not.

The order matters as much as the content. Phonological awareness before letter–sound work, quantity before numerals, spoken language before print. Teaching these out of sequence is a common and frustrating way to spend a year, and it is one of the main things an experienced early childhood teacher brings.

We also coach you. Most of the gain here comes from the hundreds of small moments in a week rather than the session, so our teachers will show you two or three things to weave into what you already do.

Working alongside the rest of the team

Where the underlying difficulty is language rather than literacy, our speech pathologists lead — see our early literacy and language delay pages. Where the barrier is the pencil, attention or sitting, our occupational therapists work on that alongside.

We follow a key worker approach so your family has one main contact rather than coordinating three professionals yourself. And we are honest about scope: our teachers do not diagnose learning difficulties, and where we think an assessment with a psychologist would help, we say so.