Phonics

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised 

At Kilsby CE Primary School, we place great importance on early reading teaching and fully understand how this can help to unlock many opportunities across the whole of the curriculum for our children. We teach phonics following a scheme called Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) which has been developed by schools for schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds programme, but it has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme which meets all the expectations of the National Curriculum. 

How can I help my child with their phonics learning? 

We understand the importance of support at home to help your child on their phonics journey. 

Here is a link to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised site for parents where you will find more information on how to support your child and pronunciation videos to help ensure consistent modelling. 

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

Intent

At Kilsby, the systematic teaching of phonics is of the highest priority throughout Reception and Key Stage 1. We believe that by placing an importance on early reading this will provide endless opportunities for our children to ‘live life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10) as they develop into confident, articulate and well-rounded individuals who can succeed and reach their full potential.
We teach a phonics scheme called Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) which has been developed by schools for schools.
Our children begin their reading journey in phonics in our pre-school and this continues throughout the EYFS and into KS1. Once the Little Wandle programme has been completed , the children progress onto the VIPERS strands where they continue to develop their reading skills - inspiring them to become life-long readers.

Implementation

Explicit whole class teaching of phonics takes place every day in the EYFS and KS1. The children are taught new sounds and tricky words Monday to Thursday and these are consolidated on a Friday. During these sessions, the children are immersed in various activities where they are taught how to read, pronunciate, write and spell sounds/words.
The children then engage in small group reading sessions three times a week. These reading sessions have a specific focus on the skills of decoding, prosody and comprehension.
‘Reading for Pleasure’ sessions and visits to the school library are also timetabled into the week to ensure that we promote a love of reading with our children and to give them the opportunity to engage with a variety of texts and authors alongside those explicitly read within phonics and whole class story times.
Reading at home is encouraged and promoted throughout the school and our children are awarded house points for every three reads completed at home. Reading accomplishments are also celebrated within the classroom and in our weekly ‘Spotlight Awards Worship’ with the whole school.

Assessment

Teachers will continually assess the children formatively throughout sessions. The children are also assessed summatively every six weeks as part of the Little Wandle programme and this determines what phase book they will read to ensure they are reading at the correct level. This is also an opportunity for the children to demonstrate their progress within their phonics and reading. Additional support and interventions are provided for those children who are not working at age-related expectations and summative assessments are carried out every three weeks for those children to ensure they are making progress and responding to the support offered.