We aim for children to become fluent readers as early as possible, and we are excited to have embraced the 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised' phonics programme. We embarked on this in January 2022, and it built on the established teaching we had previously using Letters and Sounds, adding a wealth of new resources for our children and ensuring a consistent and progressive approach to phonics teaching across the groups and classes.

Phonics at our school begins with teaching phonological awareness in Nursery, leading into structured phonics lessons throughout our Reception and KS1 (Key Stage 1) classes.

Little Wandle builds in oral blending and word reading to the learning of phonemes and graphemes, and the reading sessions focus on decoding, prosody (reading with intonation), and comprehension, which align with our belief in teaching phonics in a language-rich curriculum with books and stories at its heart. 

Children's progress is continually assessed, and from Reception, our children learn phonics in groups, so that teaching can be tailored to their needs. Further additional support is also provided when necessary.

In KS2 (Key Stage 2) some children will require continued support in segmenting and blending and will continue to follow our phonics programme. We also have KS2 decodable books for those children who need extra support in their reading with subject matter of interest to their age group.

All children will continue to make use of their phonics skills where relevant to their learning of vocabulary and language through KS2 as well as learning other spelling rules in explicitly taught spelling and grammar lessons.