Phonics

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.” – Dr Seuss

Intent

At St Francis we believe that reading is the key to accessing our whole curriculum and is the biggest indicator to future academic success. With reading at the forefront of our curriculum, we aim to establish each child as a lifetime reader and develop their love of reading. 

Little Wandle

We have chosen to teach our children phonics using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme.

Little Wandle is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. The programme ensures that children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to support them read and spell as they move through school.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read.

As phonics has been given a high priority within our school, aiming  to ensure that all children are fluent readers, all members of our teaching staff have received ‘Little Wandle’ training to ensure consistency across the school.

Implementation

How do we teach Phonics?

At St Francis we use teach phonics from Nursery up to Year 2 and for those children in Key Stage 2 who still require it. As knowledge progresses, children will move from learning letters and the sounds that they make, to reading words and simple captions, to reading short books and writing sentences. Little Wandle gives the children the opportunity to use and apply their phonic learning through regular practice which aims to improve children’s reading fluency. 

Foundations for phonics in Nursery

Phonics in Nursery is taught through 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;

• attention to high-quality language
• activities that develop focused listening and attention, including sound discrimination, playing with sounds and oral blending
• learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
• sharing high-quality stories and poems

Through these activities we ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.

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 once children are settled in their new class.  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.  

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 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 assess and plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

Impact

Rigourous assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it. Assessment for learning is used daily within class to identify children needing Keep-up support and weekly in the review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings. 

Summative assessment for EYFS and Year 1 is used every six weeks to assess progress. This identifies any gaps in learning that need to be addressed,  identifies any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need. It is also used by the Senior Leadership Team to monitor progress in Phonics. 

Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics screening check which is a statutory assessment. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Year 2. 

Fluency assessments measure children’s accuracy and reading speed in short one-minute assessments. These are used in Year 1 for those reading the Phase 5 books, with children following the Rapid Catch-up programme in Years 2 to 6 and to assess when children are ready to exit their programme.