Intent
At Blakehill Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics all children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. The teaching of phonics is of high priority.
Implementation
Systematic synthetic phonics is taught daily from Reception through to year 2 and beyond where it continues to support children to succeed. Assessment for learning takes place during all phonics lessons. Teachers identify children who need more support and implement this with immediacy.
Phonic learning is applied through little Wandle reading sessions from Reception through to Year 2. These take place 3 times a week and support children to develop fluency, prosody and comprehension.
Phonics does not stand alone at Blakehill Primary. We integrate this into many areas of the curriculum, referring back to our Grow the Code chart to recall GPCs and apply phonic strategies.
All children are supported to succeed through the use of Little Wandle SEN schemes of learning, and Daily and Rapid Catch Up sessions. Regular use of formative assessment informs this support and ensure precision teaching of phonic gaps and skills.
Impact
Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is to arm children with confidence and fluent reading skills which we can harness from Year 2 onwards through whole class reading.
Attainment in phonics is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1.
How to say Reception Autumn 1 Phase 2 sounds
How to say Reception Autumn 2 Phase 2 sounds
How to say Reception Phase 3 sounds
Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home.
Fluency
When listening to your child to read their phonics book, encourage them to read with fluency (this is when children do not say each letter sound and then blend to read the word), they will be familiar with this phrase from school.
Prosody
Ask your child to use their 'story teller voice', this is when we add expression to the words and sentences we read. Children will have practiced this at school too.
Comprehension
Share your thoughts and opinions on the book, ask your child to do the same. Is there any vocabulary they need explaining to them? You could also ask them a couple of questions to check their understanding.
Check out the Little Wandle 'Everybody Read' document for more top tips
Reception
Children start phase 2 of the Little Wandle phonics programme as soon as possible after starting Reception, usually week 2 of the Autumn term. Phase 2 teaches children the first 32 phonemes (36 graphemes) and follows a carefully sequenced progression so that children are able to start to read and write as soon as reasonably possible.
Phonics is taught every day in Reception so that children have plenty of opportunities to revisit, practice and apply their phonic knowledge. It is very important that children learn to pronounce the phonemes correctly.
Year 1
Children in Year 1 continue to follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. They learn how to ‘grow the code,’ learning that there are different ways to represent the different phonemes that they learnt in Reception.
By the end of Year 1, children will have been taught all of the phonemes and graphemes in the English language and should be able to decode and read any word. They should be reading age appropriate texts with confidence and fluency. Our aim is for children to have completed the Little Wandle programme by the end of Year 1.
Year 2
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised have provided Year 2 content that offers a seamless link from the core programme. It includes Little Wandle Fluency and Little Wandle Spelling, incorporating a Phase 5 review, Bridge to spelling and the Spelling units.
We are looking forward to using this with our current Year 2 cohort.