Development of phonics skills
Daily phonics teaching begins in Reception following the Little Wandle programme. Children learn the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. A phoneme is a unit of sound made by a letter or more than one letter and a grapheme is the letter that represents the sound. This is called Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence or GPCs. They are taught how to blend the GPCs to read a word. These skills are practised and applied to reading words, sentences and books in the phonics lessons and in the three times a week Reading Practice sessions. In these sessions all children are taught by a trained adult to apply their phonics to reading appropriate books. During the Reading Practice sessions the children also explore reading with expression or ‘prosody’, practising to read with fluency and discussing what they have read to develop their comprehension.
The Little Wandle programme is continued in Year 1 and into Year 2 to ensure that children have a secure knowledge of the phonetic code. This supports them in both their reading and spelling. We have timetabled phonics sessions every day for children of this age and there is an assessment of progress in Year 1.
Parents can get an understanding of the Little Wandle programme by following this link.
Alongside the systematic phonics work undertaken in the EYFS and KS1 there is a focus on fluency and the reading of high frequency and common exception words. Comprehension skills are explicitly taught through a variety of texts used in class that include fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
During Key Stage Two, children’s comprehension skills are further developed through the teaching of new vocabulary in context. Pupils are taught the skills of retrieval, use of prior knowledge and inference through whole class reading sessions that use a wide variety of challenging and interesting texts.
The Trust uses the ‘Little Wandle’ phonics scheme which has great resources for parents. Click on the logo for further information.
