According to the KAINO curriculum, now that your child has progressed to K2, they should have experienced a wealth of listening activities throughout the three terms in K1; which include songs, environmental and vocal sounds, body percussion sounds, stories, and rhymes. This term 1 of K2 will now see your child able to distinguish between speech sounds and many will be able to blend and segment words orally. Some children will also be able to recognize spoken words that rhyme and will be able to provide a string of rhyming words, but the inability to do this should not prevent them from moving on to K2 as these speaking and listening activities continue intensively through K2. Our main objective during this Term 1 of K2 is to teach at least the first 19 phonic letter-sounds and move children on from just oral blending and segmentation; to blending and segmenting with letters. By the end of Term 1, many children should be able to read some VC (vowel & consonant) and CVC (consonant, vowel & consonant) words and to spell them either using letter cards or by writing the letters on paper or on a board. During the Term, children will be introduced to reading two-syllable words and simple captions. They will also learn to read some high-frequency ‘tricky’ words like; the, to, go, no by the end of Term 1 of K1. At KAINOafrica, we believe and remind you to always remember that phonics is the step up to word recognition followed by automatic reading of all words.

By the end of Term 1, your child should be able to;

• Learn to say a discrete phoneme, recognize and write the letter that represents that phoneme
• Say as quickly as possible the correct sound when a letter is displayed
• Find the correct letter in response to a letter-sound being spoken
• Break words up orally into their constituent phonemes so that they can use their knowledge of letter-sounds to spell words correctly
• Sound and blend the 26 decodable high-frequency words so that they can be able to read them ‘automatically’ as soon as possible.
• Practice with reading the five tricky words, paying attention to any known letter-sound correspondences.
• It should be noted that some children will not have fully grasped CVC blending and segmentation but may know all the Term 1 letters taught so far. The CVC blending and segmentation continues throughout Term 2. So, it’s very okay for your child to progress to the next stage even if they have not mastered CVC blending because the KAINO curriculum is designed to continue teaching throughout K2 till Term 3. It should be noted that after the 60 Literacy Lessons in Term 1, children’s capacity to write letters will depend on their physical and mental maturity. Some children will be able to correctly form and write all the letters in pencil. At this point, majority of the children will be able to form the letters correctly in the air, in sand or using a paintbrush, and should be able to control a pencil sufficiently well to write letters such as l, t, i well and h, n, and m reasonably well.

As children start their Term 2 during K2, they will know around 19 letter-sounds and be able to blend phonemes to read VC words and segment VC words to spell. By Term 2, many children will be able to read and spell CVC words comfortably and should all be able to blend and segment CVC words orally. The main objective of this Term is to teach another 25 graphemes (a written symbol that represents a phoneme), most of them comprising two letters like oa so that the children can represent each of the 42 phonemes by a grapheme. Children will continue to practice CVC blending and segmentation during this term and will apply their knowledge of blending and segmenting to read and spell simple two-syllable words and captions that they had earlier on learned in Term 1. They will also learn letter names during this Term as opposed to the traditional way of teaching where the letter names are introduced together with vowels. They will learn to read some more tricky words and also begin to learn to spell some of these words and by the end of Term 2, your child should be able to:

• Say a discrete phoneme, recognize and write the letter that represents that phoneme
• Say as quickly as possible – almost instantly the correct sound when a grapheme is displayed
• Find the correct grapheme in response to a sound being spoken

By the time your child has entered Term 3 of K2, they should be able to represent each of 42 phonemes by a grapheme and be able to blend phonemes to read CVC words and segment CVC words for smooth spelling. They will also have some experience in reading simple two-syllable words and captions. They will exhibit a good understanding of letter-names and be able to read and spell some tricky words. KAINOafrica’s main objective of Term 3 is to consolidate your children’s knowledge of graphemes in reading and spelling words containing adjacent consonants and polysyllabic words to prepare them for comprehension and composition later in K3 which is their final year in kindergarten. Although the children have already learned in Term 1 and 2 the formation of the letters that are combined to form two-letter and three-letter graphemes, many may still need to say the mnemonic pattern for the formation as they write. Our KAINO lesson guides are developed to encourage children to use letter-names when referring to the individual letters in a grapheme because we believe that when children continuously repeat sounding and blending of words, they get to know them better, master them, and once this happens, we go on to encourage them to read straight off in reading text in sentences, rather than continuing to sound and blend them aloud. At KAINOafrica, we use a compiled list of 100 common words also known as high-frequency words that recur frequently in much of the written materials that young children read and need whenever they write. Most of these are decodable simply by sounding and blending, assuming the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are known. With the automatic reading of all words, decodable and tricky – as KAINOafrica’s ultimate goal, by the end of Term 3, your child should be in position to:

• Read smoothly the first 26 of the high-frequency words since they are decodable and a further 12 which are also decodable and were learned during Term 2.
• Read 6 more that are also decodable and taught in Term 3 i.e. went, it’s, from, children, just and help.
• Read a group of these words each day, by applying grapheme-phoneme knowledge as it is acquired to recognize these words quickly.
• Read simple sentences with some words that have unusual or untaught GPCs (‘tricky’ words).

By the time your children join K3, they should be able to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants and some polysyllabic words. The purpose of our K3 is for your children to broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling as we prepare them to join primary(P1) school as very excellent readers. Term 1 will see them learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for new graphemes and those previously learned during K2 in their previous year of study. Your children will become quicker at recognizing graphemes of more than one letter in words and at blending the phonemes they represent. The KAINOafrica idea is that when spelling words, they will learn to choose the appropriate graphemes to represent phonemes and begin to build word-specific knowledge of the spellings of words. The KAINO curriculum, therefore, considers this approach to be a strong foundational step toward building a strong command in the English language as a future learning tool. After the 160 literacy lessons done during Term 1, Term 2 and Term 3, children will be passed out as ready for primary school with the ability to understand and use in a sentence word endings like …ing (e.g Blend – Blending), …ed(e.g Blend – Blended), …er(e.g Blend – Blender), …est(e.g Wild – Wildest), …ful(e.g Mouth – Mouthful), …ly(e.g Bad – Badly), …y(e.g Mess – Messy)