Phonics
We follow the Little Wandle practice of high-quality phonics.
We aim to provide high- quality phonic sessions to ensure that all children have the best opportunities provided to them in order for them to become competent and confident readers and writers. We aim to secure skills of word recognition and decoding which will enable children at our school to read fluently.
Daily teaching
Daily sessions of approximately half an hour take place within EYFS and KS1.
In Reception, four letter sounds are introduced per week following the Little Wandle order. These sounds will be transferred into a purple soundbook which is taken home and can be practised further at home.
Word Boxes are introduced once children begin blending sounds to read words and fall in line with graphemes being taught at school. These are again stuck into children’s sound books to ensure these can also practised at home.
Reading books are also sent home, initially books with no words which encourage and develop children’s vocabulary and story telling skills. Then as children become confident in their reading banded books are sent home both fiction and non-fiction. Regular reading assessments will take place and children will be moved up book bands as necessary.
Our daily phonics sessions in KS1 are fun, involving lots of speaking, listening and games. The emphasis is on children’s active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent learning.
KS1 teach phonics as a discrete lesson and include phonics as part of teaching and learning throughout other curriculum lessons on a daily basis.
The structure of each lesson at Brambles and the journey of Phonics across the week enables all aspects of the blending and segmenting of phonemes/graphemes; lessons are uniquely planned and tailored to meet the needs of all our learners. We aim to provide stimulating experiences and opportunities to motivate, using a range of resources to engage individuals and groups of children.
In every discrete phonics lesson:
- In each class there will be a focus for the week for the whole class to be working on. Planning of this phoneme will show a journey across the week
- All lessons start with a clear learning objective which is linked to the phase of letters and sounds that the year group are working on.
- New phonemes will be taught using the correct articulation and terminology and all children will use this terminology in their learning. E.g, phonemes, digraphs, trigraphs, split-digraph
Here are some websites which you can use at home to support your child's learning in Phonics.
www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/curations/nursery-rhymes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/making-time-for-books-at-home
