Early Reading and Phonics
Little Wandle is the SSP (Systematic Synthetic Phonics) that will be adopted by the school for the planning and delivery of phonics sessions. Little Wandle draws on the latest research into how children learn best; how to ensure learning stays in children’s long-term memory and how best to enable children to apply their learning to become highly competent readers.
From the moment a child joins us in Nursery, there will be a huge emphasis on Communication and Language in our EYFS so that our children develop confidence with a wide variety of vocabulary. We know that spoken language underpins all 7 areas of learning. Phonics is key but this is only one aspect of reading – making sense of the words is equally important. To do this we have high quality interactions between practitioners and children that provides a language rich environment with the back-and-forth interactions that include the modelling, questioning and facilitation that the children need in order to begin more formal phonics teaching in Reception.
In Reception, children begin on phase 2 moving to phase 3 as they become secure on the phonemes taught. Phase 2 is where the children begin learning their initial sounds and start the process of blending to read words and simple sentences. Phase 3 explores digraphs and trigraphs that the children need to be able to read longer words. Phase 4 will provide plenty of recap opportunities before, in the summer term, the children will then explore the more complex sounds in Phase 5. The children receive daily phonics sessions which includes saying and writing the sounds they have learnt and forming words.
In Year 1 the children will focus on securing Phase 5 to ensure their knowledge is secure and they can automatically apply their phonics knowledge to unfamiliar words. By this time, they use digraphs and consonant blends to read longer words and sentences, this also includes the ‘alien (nonsense) words’. In June, the children will take part in the Phonics Screening Check which will assess if they have secured the expected phonics knowledge.
In Year 2 and beyond, any children who still require phonics support will be able to access this via small group interventions.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Reception and Year 1 Overview
