Phonics

Introducing ‘Little Wandle, Letters and Sounds Revised’

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Phonics

Our federation has chosen Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to teach early reading and spelling. This is supported by ‘Collins Big Cat’ reading books that are matched to and reinforce the sounds (phonemes) your child is learning.  The following link will help you with the way the sounds are taught and give some useful information and downloads, with superb videos of how each sound should be pronounced.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Children in Reception and Year 1 have daily phonics lessons.  Most weeks they will be taught 4 new grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) per week, plus a review lesson on a Friday. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme (sound) to a grapheme (written representation) and vice versa.  Each day there is also a focus on revising or learning ‘tricky words’.  Tricky words are those words which cannot be sounded out using the phonemes that they have been taught. The lessons are in 6-week blocks, with the last week being a revision and assessment week. We assess your child every six weeks to check progress. Any child who needs extra support will have keep-up sessions planned for them.

Phonics lesson will be supported by 3 reading sessions per week.  Children will read 3 times per week using the same book focusing on different skills:

 -Decoding

 -Prosody (expression)

 -Comprehension

However, you can have a massive impact on their reading journey by supporting this practice with what you do at home.  They will then bring this book home to read.  As this book is matched to your child’s phonic ability their reading should be fluent and automatic.  The aim is that the children read at 95% fluency.  This mean that the children should need little to no support reading the words.

Once your child has finished Little Wandle phonics their daily lessons will move to a spelling focus and they will join our Accelerated Reader programme for reading.

Little Wandle also includes a Rapid Catch-up programme that is available for children in Year 2 and above who are not reading at the expected level for their age. It mirrors the main phonics programme but has been created to help children catch up quickly, so has a faster pace. By the end of the Rapid Catch-up programme, children should be reading with enough fluency and accuracy to access the curriculum in class, and to read with enjoyment and understanding.

Phonics terminology

You may hear your child or their teacher use these words.

Phonics

Making connections between the sounds of our spoken words and the letters

that are used to write them down.

Phoneme

Any of the 44 sounds which make up words in the English language.

Grapheme

How a phoneme is written down. There can be more than one way to spell

a phoneme e.g. the phoneme ‘ay’ is spelt differently in each of the word’s way, make,

fail, great, sleigh and lady

Blending

Putting together the sounds in a word in order to read it e.g. “f - r - o - g,

frog”

Segmenting

Breaking a word into sounds in order to spell them e.g. “frog, f - r - o - g”

Digraph

 2 letters making one sound e.g. ch, th, ay, ee

Split vowel digraph

 A digraph that is split by a consonant e.g. cake, five, code

Trigraph

3 letters making one sound e.g. air, ear, igh, tch