Little Wandle Letters and Sounds

At Dingle Community Primary School, we believe that for all our children to become fluent readers and writers, phonics must be taught through a systematic and structured phonics programme. To teach phonics, we use a systematic synthetic programme (SSP) called Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised to plan and provide daily engaging phonics lessons. The programme is designed to teach children to read from Reception to Year 2, using the skill of decoding and blending sounds together to form words. The Little Wandle: Letters and sounds Revised’ programme provides a full progression through all commonly occurring GPCs (sounds), working from simple to more complex, and taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words. It also ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics for reading and spelling as they move through school.

Intent

At Dingle Community Primary School, our children are at the heart of all decision making and we are passionate about ensuring that by the time they leave us and end their primary education, they have become fluent, confident and enthusiastic life-long readers and writers, enabling them to enter secondary education equipped with the skills to succeed and reach their full potential.
 

We believe that Phonics and Early Reading provide the foundations of learning and is the cornerstone of our entire curriculum. We know that reading is a fundamental life skill and that early reading in particular is essential for our children's future success. We know the importance of supporting children to develop these skills as early as possible is important for this to become achievable. It is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners, regardless of background.

At Dingle Community Primary School, we model the application of the alphabetic code through Phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the Phonics lessons. We believe that reading is the passport to all other subjects in school and underpins many aspects of learning. Reading therefore is reinforced and practised across all subjects. We have a strong focus on the development of language skills for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

Aims:

• Teach every child to read.
• Ensure phonics and reading teaching is accessible to every child.
• Build each child's alphabetic code, to enable them to master phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
• Model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.
• Instil confidence in every child with their encoding and decoding skills.
• Encourage every child to see themselves as a reader for both pleasure and purpose.

 

Implementation

Foundations for phonics in Nursery

Our phonics teaching starts in Nursery and follows a very specific sequence that allows our children to build on their previous phonic knowledge and master specific phonic strategies as they move through school. As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all our children to meet the curriculum expectations for 'Communication and Language' and 'Literacy'. These include:

• Sharing high-quality texts, stories and poems
• Learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
• Activities/engaging games that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending and phonemic awareness 
• Attention to high-quality language

Foundations for phonics sets out the provision that should be in place to ensure children are well prepared to begin grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC) and blending at the start of Reception.  The introduction to GPC’s begin in the Summer term.

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

In Reception, phonics starts in week 2 to ensure the children make a strong start. The children participate in daily phonics lessons which build from 10-minute lessons (Autumn 1 - daily oral blending games) to increasingly quickly 30-minute lessons (Autumn 2 - full-length lesson). Each Friday, we review the week's teaching to help children become fluent readers. Children in reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 GPC's in Autumn before moving onto Phase 3 GPC's in Spring. Phase 4 is introduced in the Summer term where children learn to read longer words and compound words and by the end of reception, the children will have been taught up to the end of Phase 4 ready for Phase 5 in Year 1.

In Year 1 children participate in daily phonics sessions lasting 30 minutes. In Autumn 1, children begin by reviewing Phase 3 and 4 before moving onto Phase 5. New Phase 5 graphemes are taught throughout the Autumn and Spring term. A review of the Phase 5 graphemes and tricky words are recapped throughout Summer 1. The last new Phase 5 graphemes are taught in Summer 2.

We ensure consistency in all of our phonics lessons in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 by using the complete planning and content supplied by Little Wandle. Our consistent lesson structure means that pupils know what to expect in their phonics sessions. The lesson structure looks like this:

Revisit and Review 

Quick flash review. Each session will begin by rapidly revisiting any sounds that have been previously taught. The children will then read some words containing any sounds that they have been previously taught, along with tricky words they have learnt in previous lessons.

Teach and Practise 

The session will move onto introducing the new sound and practising pronouncing it. Within the teach and practise section, children will be given the opportunity to form the sound, match to the letter, practise oral blending of the sound in words, teacher led blending words and the exposure of new tricky words.

Examples of this are:

• Timed reading of GPCs/words/tricky words.
• Reading words quickly: ask children to find the digraph and then read the word fluently.
• Reading longer words using the chunking method.
• Aim to read some longer words fluently each time.
• Oral blending throughout the day
• Teacher- led blending throughout the day

Practise and Apply 

Children have the opportunity to read and write a sentence which usually has 2-3 words that includes the new focus sound for that particular day. In this part of the lesson, the children will also have the opportunity to practise their spelling.

Daily Keep-up lessons

• It is our vision, that any child who needs additional practice will have daily Keep-up support, which will   be taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons will match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
• A timetable is created for these daily phonics lessons so that any child in Year 2 and above who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check can be targeted. Catch up is a priority so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We will use the Rapid Catch-up assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Rapid Catch-up resources – at pace. 
• Ideally, these short, sharp lessons will last 10-15 minutes daily and have been designed to ensure children quickly catch up to age-related expectations in reading.

Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions

• As part of our vision, we also want to teach children to read through reading practice sessions two times a week. These will be:
  • taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
  • use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids on pages 11–20 of ‘Application of phonics to reading’.
  • are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
• Each reading practice session will have a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
  • decoding
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

• Ideally, in Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
• In Years 2 and Key Stage 2, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

Home reading

Although the children in Reception and KS1, and those who need more practise with decodable books will be taught to read at school, parental involvement can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home. There are two types of books the children will bring home.

READING PRACTICE BOOK - ‘Books I Can Read To You’: These are phonetically decodable books that have been carefully matched to the children’s current reading level. The Little Wandle assessments inform teachers which books are suitable to the child’s level of reading based off the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds matching grid. The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family.

SHARING BOOK – ‘Books We Can Share Together’: In order to encourage the children to become lifelong learners, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. The sharing book is a book the children have chosen independently and want to enjoy with their family together. We share the research behind the importance and impact of sharing quality children’s books with parents through workshops, leaflets and the Everybody read! resources. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

 

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress

• Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
• Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
• Lesson templates, Prompt cards and How to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
• The Phonics and Early Reading Leader, English Leads and SLT use the Audit and Prompt cards to regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and gaps in learning.
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Ensuring reading for pleasure

‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)

‘The will influences the skill and vice versa.’ (OECD 2010)

We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy.

• We read to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at Dingle Community Primary School and our local community as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
• We have inviting book corners and whole school library areas that encourage a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books.
• In Nursery/Reception/Year 1, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.
• Children in every year group have a home reading record. The parent/carer records comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will write in this on a regular basis to ensure communication between home and school. We have an expectation that the children will read at home at least 3 times a week.
• As the children progress through the school, they are encouraged to write their own comments and keep a list of the books/authors that they have read.
• Classes have the opportunity to visit the local library and to take part in competitions that they have throughout the year.
• Children across the school have regular opportunities to engage with a wide range of Reading for Pleasure events (book fairs, author visits and workshops, national events etc).
• We use the Everybody read! resources to grow our teachers’ knowledge of current books, the most recent research and to grow our own Reading for Pleasure practice.

Impact

Assessment

Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.

• Assessment for learning is used:
  • daily within class to identify children needing Keep-up support
  • weekly in the Review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.

 

• Summative assessment for Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 is used:

every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need.