Phonics
Phonics and Early Reading
“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Reading is at the heart of everything that we do at Ealdham Primary School - it is the key our children need to unlock their futures.
We use ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ as our phonics and early reading programme. This is a systematic synthetic phonics programme, which enables teachers to support children in developing their phonic knowledge for reading and writing. Little Wandle programme provides a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, covering all 44 phonemes (sounds).
Please click here to see the full progression overview of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme and the link to the National Curriculum.
Little Wandle progression overview
How we teach children to read at Ealdham:
- Daily phonics lessons: 4 new sounds per week and a review lesson.
Each lesson is approximately 20 to 30 minutes long.
- Regular exposure to taught sounds
- Phonics as a route to decoding; to be able to blend to read and segment to spell.
- Learnt in ‘phases’ as a whole class (Phase 2, 3 and 4 taught in Reception and Phase 5 in Year 1)
- Keep up sessions that may be 1:1 or group as needed
- After 5 weeks of teaching, the children are assessed on the sounds they have been learning, their blending skills, reading of words with key sounds and tricky words that have been introduced.
- 3 reading practice sessions with a decodable book
(Session 1: Decoding, Session 2: Prosody – Reading with Expression, Session 3: Comprehension)
- In Year 2 and Year 3, phonic lessons are taught daily to children where appropriate. Again, we follow the Little Wandle programme with a focus on plugging any gaps identified through assessment.
- In Years 3 to 6, there are planned sessions following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised age 7+ programme. Children take part in Rapid Catch Up sessions when needed.
Supporting your child with Phonics
There are some really useful videos for parents on the Little Wandle website; you can also find them on YouTube. Have a look at how we teach blending, tricky words and alien words.
The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home.
These three videos show you how to pronounce the sounds. Notice how the children don’t add an ‘uh’ sound at the end, so they say: ‘t’ not ‘tuh’.
There are even more videos on both the Little Wandle Website and YouTube, but here are the videos on how we teach blending, tricky words and alien words.
Reading at Home:
Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practise at home.
There are two types of reading books that your child may bring home:
Reading practise book
A reading practise book. This will be at the correct phonic stage for your child. They should be able to read this fluently and independently.
This book has been carefully matched to your child’s current reading level. If your child is reading it with little help, please don’t worry that it’s too easy – your child needs to develop fluency and confidence in reading.
Listen to them read the book. Remember to give them lots of praise – celebrate their success! If they can’t read a word, read it to them. After they have finished, talk about the book together.
We are also excited to announce that we are in the process of signing children up so that their reading practice book is available online through Collins ebooks. You will need your child’s username and password to access the book, which we will be sharing soon with you.
Please remember to comment in their Reading Record and that the children bring these in daily.
Sharing book
A sharing book. Your child will not be able to read this on their own. This book is for you both to read and enjoy together.
In order to encourage your child to become a lifelong reader, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. The sharing book is a book they have chosen for you to enjoy together.
Please remember that you shouldn’t expect your child to read this alone. Read it to or with them. Discuss the pictures, enjoy the story, predict what might happen next, use different voices for the characters, explore the facts in a non-fiction book. The main thing is that you have fun!
Year 1/2 Phonics Screening
The Phonics Screening Check (or Phonics Screening Test) is a test to assess and show how well your child can use and apply the phonics skills that they’ve learnt up to the end of Year 1. It takes place every year. The Phonics Screening Check is also an opportunity for teachers to identify students who need help with their phonics. If they do not pass the test in Year 1, they have an opportunity to re-take the test in Year 2.
During the Phonics Screening Check, children are asked to read (i.e. decode) 40 words. Most of these words are real words, but some are also pseudo-words. A pseudo-word is a made up word that features strings of letters that resemble real words.
https://www.twinkl.co.uk/event/phonics-screening-check-2022-2025
Please click on the links below for parent flashcards that you can purchase on Amazon.
Glossary
These are some of the main new words that your children might share with you.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound that can be identified in words. We sometimes simply call this a ‘sound’.
Grapheme: A letter or group of letters used to represent a particular phoneme when writing.
Digraph: A grapheme using two letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘two letters that make one sound’.
Trigraph: A grapheme using three letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘three letters that make one sound’.
Blending: To combine individual phonemes into a whole word, working all the way through from left to right. Once the GPCs involved have been learned, blending is the key process involved in reading words effectively. It is a skill that needs extensive practise.
Segment: To identify each of the individual phonemes in a word, working all the way through from left to right. This is an important first stage of writing (spelling) a word but needs to be practised orally first.
Split vowel digraph: A digraph representing a vowel sound where its two letters are split by an intervening consonant (for example, ‘a_e’ in ‘take’). Despite having a consonant in between them, the two letters involved (here ‘a’ and ‘e’) still count as one digraph, making one sound. The vowel sound is pronounced at the position of the first of the two letters of the digraph (that is, in the middle of ‘take’). At early learning stages, a split digraph is often highlighted with a short line joining the two halves of the digraph above the intervening consonant, as shown below.
Tricky words: High-frequency words that, although decodable in themselves, cannot be decoded by children using the GPCs they have been taught up to that point.
Please click here for the full glossary
