The Afternoon programme at Rainbow is in English! The whole idea is that it is English emersion. The children are completely emerged in English. This will strengthen and develop their vocabulary, increase their confidence in speaking and communicating in English and support this ability to interact in a range of social and formal contexts.

The programme is essentially play based and incredibly fun and engaging, but includes elements of more formal teaching and learning. Our approach is taken from the UK model. We use engaging project themes across each week to focus the development of vocabulary and inform art, design, cooking, construction work as well as emerging reading, writing and language based skills. The children are split into 6 different groups in the afternoon, which broadly represents their age, abilities and skill level in English as well as their peer and friendship groups. The groups are therefore not equal in size and number, but the planning and timetabling, enables children to access all facilities across the Ha-avoda 10 site, and engage with a range of teachers and practitioners.

Each group has specifically tailored phonics and language activities tallied to the stage of development and readiness to being developing reading and writing skills in English, ask well as focusing on an expanding vocabulary.

Our programme follows the Jolly Phonics methodology, where phonics (sounds) are accompanied by an action, taught through a song. This Youtube video shows you the entire Jolly Phonics system; you may wish to watch this and practice sometimes with your children at home.

https://youtu.be/ByPW0xDpsnE

In addition, we use the British ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme to teach phonics and develop early reading and writing skills in English.

We provide daily speaking and listening activities that are well matched to children’s developing abilities and interests, drawing upon our observations. WE plan for each group’s progression and support children to discriminate and produce the sounds of speech.

We provide a rich and varied environment to support children’s language learning through Phase One of the Letters and Sounds programme. Oral blending and segmenting the sounds in words are an integral part of the later stages of Phase One. Whilst recognising alliteration (words that begin with the same sound) is important as children develop their ability to tune into speech sounds, the main objective should be segmenting words into their component sounds, and especially blending the component sounds all through a word.

Exploring the sounds in words should occur as opportunities arise throughout the course of the day’s activities, as well as in planned adult-led sessions with groups and individual children. Children’s curiosity in letter shapes and written words should be fostered throughout Phase One to help them make a smooth transition to Phase Two, when grapheme–phoneme correspondences are introduced.

The full programme can be downloaded here if you wish to read it, please note that this publication is aimed at teachers; but it gives you an overview of our step by step teaching methods within the programme. CLICK HERE

Our daily time time for the afternoon is presented below. The numbers across the top of the timetable show the group number, and the activities below indicate what each group is doing throughout the afternoon. You will notice that groups are sometimes combined together, and at other times have discrete teaching or focused activities.

For the last section of the day, the children who attend all morning, revert back to their morning colour groups, as they leave at 4:30pm, and the afternoon children have a choice of three workshops; before their end of day story in English!

The key blow indicates where each of the planned activities in the timetables above are planned to take place.

Click here to download the timetable in PDF

A unique weekly plan is devised by the staff at Rainbow, for each ‘focused’ activity identified in the plan, and each teaching session. Games, resources and teaching materials have been specifically developed for the programme and appropriate activities are selected each week to support children’s progression.