Phonics
‘To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.’ - Victor Hugo
Here at West Wittering School, the reading and sharing of a high quality text is a vital part of our curriculum, as we believe that from one good book, a love of reading can be born. Our youngest children right through to our oldest children are provided with daily opportunities to enjoy a range of books, both in the classroom and from our library.
Reading is incorporated throughout our curriculum, with our book led topics, where a high quality and engaging book is the centre of all learning taking place within the classroom. Through these high quality texts, children’s vocabulary and comprehension is extended, which in turn, supports their writing. We aim to build a passion in reading for ALL our children.
Reading is taught explicitly in our classrooms, as well as being fed through all other subjects. The youngest children in the school begin their reading journey with phonics. This is a 20-30 minute daily session, which they access in as a year group.
Our phonics lessons follow the Department for Education validated systematic synthetic phonic (SSP) programme, Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This scheme is a comprehensive, research based programme, designed to teach children to read from reception to year 2, using the skill of decoding and blending sounds together to form words.
Each phonics group use the same resources to maintain consistency as they move to the next phase and class. All adults have received Little Wandle Phonics Training to ensure, no matter which year group they are in, they know and understand how phonics is taught.
The Little Wandle website is a fantastic resource to use as parents to help you feel confident in supporting your child’s reading at home. Please take a look!
Our scheme is made up of 6 phases. We would expect the children to have completed phase 1 by the time they come to school and this phase is developed alongside phase 2 and 3 in reception. Phase 2 is the teaching of single sounds where the children get daily opportunities to read and record these sounds, moving on to reading CVC words too. The children are taught to recognise these sounds within words and have the opportunity to consolidate these through guided reading sessions.
Phase 3 is where the children begin to learn their digraphs (two letters which make one sound, e.g. ‘sh’). These sounds are introduced to the children and practiced in the same way as phase 2, with the added challenge of sentence reading and writing. We expect children in reception to have completed phase 3 and be within phase 4 by the end of the year.
Within year 1 and 2, phase 4, 5 and 6 are then taught. Phase 4 is used to consolidate the sounds that the children have previously learnt and to begin the teaching of consonant blends (sp, cr). They follow the same structure and use the same resources as the previous phases. Phase 5 will continue to teach the children alternative spellings to digraphs and how and when to use these within their reading and writing. Phase 6 has a more grammatical focus, teaching the children how to read and spell words with common suffixes (ed, ing, ly), to read and use past tense correctly and teaching spelling and reading of longer words.
Phonics in KS2
Typically, children will leave the phonics programme by the end of KS1 and will move onto guided reading and working on developing their skills of comprehension, rather than the mechanics of reading. For those children who leave KS1 and enter KS2 not having fully grasped phonics, we provide additional daily phonic sessions to boost these children, to ensure that they get the skills they need to develop into confident worldly readers. These sessions are pitched at the level needed and are addressed in a more mature approach, to ensure that the children see these sessions as important reading lessons. These sessions are led by our Little Wandle trained staff.
