Phonics

At St Paul’s, we use the Little Wandle: Letters and Sounds Revised scheme as our platform to teach early reading. The scheme, taught from Reception to Year 1, is used to teach children that sounds are represented by letters and that these sounds can be blended together to form words. We work closely with the Westgarth English Hub to enable our Early Reading Lead and phonics practitioners to be the very best that they can be. We invest in their success to give our pupils a robust foundation in reading skills which will serve them in becoming well-rounded learners.

Foundations for phonics in Nursery

• We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:
  • sharing high-quality stories and poems
  • learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
  • activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending
  • attention to high-quality language.
• We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception by supporting children to become confident with the skills of phase 1 phonics. These skills are broken down into seven different aspects:

• Aspect 1 – Environmental Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 2 – Instrumental Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 3 – Body Percussion Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 4 – Rhythm and Rhyme
• Aspect 5 – Alliteration
• Aspect 6 – Voice Sounds
• Aspect 7 – Oral Blending and Segmenting

The purpose of these different aspects is to develop children’s language abilities in the following ways:

• Learning to listen attentively
• Enlarging their vocabulary
• Speaking confidently to adults and other children
• Discriminating between different phonemes
• Reproducing audibly the phonemes they hear

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

• We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
• Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
• We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:
  • Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
  • Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

• Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
• We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.
• If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions three times a week

• We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These:
  • are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of children
  • use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments. These books have been produced by Harper Collins and are explicitly matched to the Little Wandle scheme. For a comprehensive list of these books and which sound(s) they are matched to, please see the school website.
  • are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
• Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
  • decoding
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.
• In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
• In Year 2 and 3, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

• We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

Additional reading support for vulnerable children

• Children in Reception and Year 1 who are receiving additional phonics Keep-up sessions read their reading practice book to an adult one-to-one twice per week.

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress

• Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
• Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
• Lesson templates, Prompt cards and How to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.

For more information about phonics at St Paul’s, please see our Phonics and Early Reading policy.