In England, with the roll-out of 'Letters and Sounds' (DfES 2007), phonics in the Nursery was very much about an emphasis on activities to do with raising awareness of 'sound' generally (the 'seven aspects' including sounds in the environment, body percussion, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, language play, oral blending and segmenting at phoneme level etc.).
Guidance for 'Phase One' was very vague about the introduction of letter shapes based on children expressing an interest in letter shapes therefore 'follow their interests'.
Over the years, however, there has been an increasing emphasis by some people regarding phonics for children of Nursery age, especially if the Nursery is attached to a school - therefore priming the children for entry into Reception where a 'systematic synthetic phonics programme' is likely to be initiated.
Some Nurseries even start their selected core phonics programme - perhaps in a more limited way - for example, introducing the letter/s-sound correspondences with the resources of a specific programme with a specific mnemonic system (aid to memory) such as Read Write Inc or Jolly Phonics.
This early start, however, sometimes leads to complications if introduced on the basis of which children 'are ready for phonics' and which aren't. Thus, the Reception teacher could then be faced with some children who had, in effect, started the phonics programme already whereas others haven't had the same level of exposure meaning that it creates a difficult decision as to 'which' children should start the core phonics programme 'at what point' and 'when' in Reception.
Interestingly, a report brought out by an HMI (Her Majesty's Inspector) of some schools in Stoke-on-Trent clearly encouraged some high-quality phonics provision even in Nursery (e.g. teach the Nursery children to hold a pencil correctly). You can read this report here:
http://www.phonicsinternational.com/for ... toke+trent
Meanwhile, a colleague of mine urged me to provide phonics resources for three to four year olds even though I have never been a person to push phonics provision ever-earlier - four year olds have always seemed young enough for a systematic approach to phonics provision as far as I was concerned. This friend, Rachel Hornsey, was working with three to four year olds and was adamant that they would benefit from some high-quality exposure to phonics -and we discussed the issue as to whether this had to be 'systematic' and 'cumulative' in the same way as a formal-planned Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme is designed. Together we designed various resources and trialled an approach to phonics which focused first and foremost on the single letters of the alphabet - both capital and lower case letter shapes (as these are both code for the same sounds and capital letters are rarely taught well enough) - and which links the letters and sounds to themes appropriate to events and topics in the nursery generally - and to stories, poems, songs - and so on.
This became the 'Teeny Reading Seeds' resource.
The phonics skills can be modelled separately from one another in the main - that is, either model sounding out and blending for reading with print-to-sound processes - or model oral segmenting and spelling (sound-to-print) - but don't model both at the same time to cause confusion.
Select short words to model with in the main - but not always - such as farm animal names when enjoying a 'farm' topic - hen, rat, cat, dog - but also don't shy away from animal names with letter groups - just explain about the alphabetic code in words such as g-oa-t and sh-ee-p. This is what I refer to as 'incidental phonics' teaching, such as:
Downloadable poster for incidental phonics teaching even for Nursery children:
http://www.phonicsinternationalpreschoo ... l_name.pdf
The ethos of this approach in Nursery is 'experience and exposure' - with the view that children may, or may not, remember what they are exposed to - but many children certainly do remember and it sets them up very well for the formal, planned Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme, starting from the beginning, in Reception.
Having explained this approach to an Early Years Leader recently, she replied:
You can read a bit more about this approach which underpins 'Teeny Reading Seeds' here:"Having been a Reception teacher for far too long, I am moving into Nursery for the first time and your materials have given me hope that we can be sufficiently loose but still have those high expectations. My gripe has always been that children have entered our reception class unable to segment/blend and have been ill-prepared to start a programme, so I can see now how we can embed those skills very early on and quite naturally through lots of modelling.”
http://www.phonicsinternationalpreschoo ... et_TRS.pdf
And you can read about both the 'Teeny Reading Seeds' approach and the 'Early Years Starter Package' resources here:
http://www.phonicsinternationalpreschool.com