By the end of the foundation stage, most children will be able to,

• enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language, and readily turn to it in their play and learning;
  
• explore and experiment with sounds, words and texts;
  
• listen with enjoyment and respond to stories, songs and other music, rhymes and poems and make up their own stories, songs, rhymes and poems;
  
• use language to imagine and recreate roles and experiences;
  
• talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events;
  
• sustain attentive listening, responding to what they have heard by relevant comment% questions or actions;
  
• interact with others, negotiating plans and activities and taking turns in conversation;
  
• extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words;
  
• retell narratives in the correct sequence, drawing on the language patterns of stories;
  
• speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control and show awareness of the listener, for example by their use of conventions such as greetings, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’;
  

• hear and say initial and final sounds in words, and short vowel sounds within words;
  
• link sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet;
  
• read a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences independently;
  
• know that print carries meaning and, in English, is read from left to right and top to bottom;
  
• show an understanding of the elements of stories, such as main character sequence of events, and openings, and how information can be found in non-fiction texts to answer questions about where, who, why and how;
  
• attempt writing for various purposes, using features of different forms such as lists, stories and instructions;
  
• write their own names and other things such as labels and captions and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation;
  
• use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make 2 phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words;
• use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable letters, most of which are correctly formed.