Phonics and Early Reading- Little Wandle

Intent
Our intent is to ensure every single child develops a love of books and becomes a fluent reader, that they know more and remember more in order to progress in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
Our intention is to rapidly build phonics skills and confidence in order to produce confident blending and decoding skills to assist pupils’ basic reading and spelling skills. Strong phonics skills and knowledge of common exception words build good comprehension skills and confident readers.
Implementation
We follow the Government accredited scheme Little Wandle. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP). We start teaching Little Wandle in EYFS, which ensures that children build upon their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. As a result, it is our intent that all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.
In addition to the daily phonics lessons, each child in Key Stage 1 takes part in three reading practice sessions per week. In these sessions we focus on decoding, prosody and comprehension.
Why learning to read is so important:
- Reading is essential for all subject areas and improves life chances.
- Positive attitudes to reading and choosing to read have academic, social and emotional benefits for children.
How children learn to read:
- Phonics is the only route to decoding.
- Learning to say the phonic sounds.
- By blending phonic sounds to read words.
- Increasing the child’s fluency in reading sounds, words and books
Phonic Decodable Books:
- Children must read books consistent with their phonic knowledge.
- It is essential not to use other strategies to work out words (including guessing words, deducing meaning from pictures, grammar, context clues or whole word recognition).
- Books must be fully decodable and follow the Little Wandle scheme.
- Children need to read books in a progressive sequence until they can decode unfamiliar words confidently.
The Role of Parents and Carers:
- Have a positive impact on their child’s reading.
- Should model the importance of reading practice to develop fluency.
- Children take home books they have read at school to re-read at home to build fluency.
- There are two different types of books that pupils bring home: reading practice and books to share for pleasure.
- Reading at home encourages a love of books, along with developing vocabulary and discussion.
- Parents should use voices, expression, discuss unfamiliar vocabulary, talk about the pictures, and predict what might happen next.
- Give positive yet informative feed backby using the GO READ APP at least 3 times a week.