🔤Early Start Phonics (FYP)

Almost every reading difficulty later on traces back to one thing: a child who cannot reliably hear the separate sounds inside a spoken word. Early Start Phonics fixes that before a pencil ever touches paper. The first four weeks contain no letters at all — just listening games you can play in the car, in the bath and at the supermarket.

Once your child can pick out first sounds confidently, letters arrive in the order Oxford's synthetic phonics sequence uses, so the very first four sounds already spell real words. Children read 'sat' and 'tap' in week five and the whole thing starts to feel like a game they are winning.

What your child will be able to do

By the end of this course, a learner working at the expected pace will be able to:

• Hear and say the initial sound in any spoken word
• Recognise all 26 letter shapes and their most common sound
• Blend two- and three-sound words out loud (c-a-t → cat)
• Hold a pencil with a tripod grip and trace letter families
• Sit and listen to a story for eight to ten minutes

How the course is structured

Early Start Phonics (FYP) is organised into 4 units covering 60 lessons in total, designed to run across 20 weeks at roughly 2 hours a week. The unit outline below shows 16 representative lessons.

Listening before letters

• Sound walks: what can you hear?
• Rhyme time with nursery favourites
• Clapping syllables in names
• Odd one out: matching first sounds

The first sixteen sounds

• s, a, t, p — and our first word
• i, n, m, d with tracing practice
• g, o, c, k sound hunts
• ck, e, u, r blending games

Blending out loud

• Two-sound words: at, in, up
• Three-sound words with picture cards
• Robot talking: stretch then squash
• Reading our first tiny book together

Pencil control and letter formation

• Big shapes: circles, lines and zig-zags
• Letter families: curly c, a, d, g
• Straight letters: l, t, i, f
• Writing my own name

How it is taught

Three- and four-year-olds learn in short, frequent bursts, so every lesson is capped at six minutes of screen time followed by an off-screen activity. Nothing is auto-advanced; you decide when to repeat a session, and repetition is expected rather than treated as failure.

What is included

• 60 short video lessons (average 6 minutes)
• Printable sound mats and flashcards
• 12 tick-box progress checks for parents
• Weekly 'play this today' activity cards

Who this course suits

This course sits in the FYP track and follows a oxford-aligned sequence. It suits families who want a complete, sequenced english year rather than a set of loose practice activities, and it assumes no teaching experience — every lesson includes a short method note for the adult. If your child is comfortably ahead or behind the beginner level described here, use the placement check in lesson one and start at the recommended point instead of lesson one.