Sunshine Starters is a new literacy programme that focuses on the five essential skill areas that all children need in order to develop into successful readers. Evidence-based findings have identified these key areas as:

Phonemic Awareness

– the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

Phonics

– understanding the relationship between written letters (graphemes) and sounds.

Vocabulary

– developing an ever-increasing base of known words and their meaning.

Comprehension

– ability to understand and make meaning from text.

Fluency

– ability to read at pace with accuracy and expression.