We know early reading experiences matter; how we teach reading and how we model the pleasure of being able to read affects how young children perceive themselves as readers. This is why we have added reading with decodable books into the core part of how we teach reading. The application of phonics in fully decodable reading books is they key that turns a young reader into a reader for life. We teach reading to children in small groups with books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge in reading words. This means that children are able to concentrate in gaining fluency. Segmenting –identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and being able to write down the letters for each sound i.e. him h-i-m.

The teaching of Phonics involves introducing the children to the correct terminology to help build their skills and work more independently with their reading. We will no longer to individual reading in class. The children will have 3 reading sessions a week with a teacher or TA. Each reading session will focus on different things. For more information about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, book your free spot for their first briefing of the new school year on 2nd September 2021 at 3.45pm.Childrencould cut out any graphemes they find in magazines or newspapers and use them to spell words. Play splat. Choose graphemes/words (about 5 or 6) to write on a piece of paper and then call out one of the words. The first one to 'splat' the correct word or grapheme wins a point. Change words/graphemes after a certain time. We support this further from year 2 and in Key Stage 2 with our spellings programme and weekly SPAG lessons in Year 3 upwards. We continue to support children with ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ through Key Stage 2 where needed. Many of us know and love Letters and Sounds and have worked hard to make it successful in our settings. We have gathered materials and created resources to teach it as well as we can. When Letters and Sounds was created in 2007, it gave us all the structure and training to teach children to read using Systematic Synthetic Phonics. Its structure and planning gave us an overarching progression and pedagogy, which many schools have used and leaned on ever since.

A colour book-banded reading book which is fully decodable. Children should be able to sound out any words that they are unsure of, enabling them to build further confidence when reading. This continues our practice of children taking home a physical book, matched to their reading level. A lot of things will remain the same. The children are already having daily phonics sessions. Reception will continue with this session but Year 1 will now have 2 sessions per day. Write down some words get children to read and then cut up words into graphemes or use the flashcards (e.g. snail would be cut up into 's-n-ai-l' to include digraph. Then get children to reassemble word correctly. They may then like to think of rhyming words and have a go at spelling these. This could lead to a discussion about how different graphemes can represent the same sound (e.g. a_e in whale). Practise– using the sound in words – Spotting the new phoneme in words, modelling blending and then allowing the children to read words with the new sound from flashcards?Match the picture. Select pictures from magazine or online and practise oral blending i.e. a picture of a beach, the child will need to orally sound out ‘ b-ea-ch’. You can also show some pictures and then cards showing words to match the picture and the child has to match the word with the correct picture once they have sounded it out and blended. Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds usually begins at Nursery and Preschool age. Children are introduced to the skills they will need to then begin recognising and identifying their letters and corresponding sounds. Children begin to learn the phonemes and corresponding graphemes from Phase 2 of the Letters and Sounds scheme during Reception. They will then progress through the phases usually within Key Stage 1 of Primary School. Each phase is made up of sets of phonemes so children are introduced to a few sounds at a time, progressively getting more complex as they build their knowledge and skills. I know this is a lot of information so if you have any questions then please ask. We offered a google meeting to share this information and to answer any questions.