At Scarcroft, we are committed to ensuring that our children progress successfully through a structured synthetic phonics programme. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds (Revised) forms the backbone of reading teaching in EYFS and KS1, allowing children to become fluent decoders.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. Following Little Wandle Letters and Sounds allows us to ensure consistency, fidelity and rigour of phonics teaching throughout school. We value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure.
Children have a daily phonics lesson from early in Reception which follows the progression from Little Wandle. This continues in Year 1 to ensure children become fluent readers. We usually teach four new phonemes and their corresponding graphemes each week (grapheme phoneme correspondence or GPC). These are then used in the final lesson of the week to review the week’s learning. Children also learn tricky words during these sessions.
In the Autumn and Spring term, Reception children learn phase 2 and phase 3 GPCs and in the summer term learn phase 4. Year 1 begin the Autumn term with revision of phases 2, 3 and 4 before learning phase 5, which will be completed by the end of the year. Year 2 children begin the year by revisiting phase 5 and other previously taught phases to ensure all children are completely confident with applying these GPCs in both their reading and their writing.
Reading Practice sessions
Children take part in reading practice sessions at school three times a week. We look at the same book in each session and focus on a different aspect of reading, enabling children to become fluent readers:
Session 1: Decoding – sounding out and blending the individual words
Session 2: Prosody – reading with rhythm, stress and intonation
Session 3: Comprehension – understanding and use of language
