Phonics

Teaching reading skills starts from the moment we are born. Listening to the sounds around us in the world, tuning into voices and starting to form our own sounds. Our approach at Long Sutton to phonics is to use the Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme. This is a validated Government scheme. We teach phonics with the expectation that our pupils will be fluent readers having secured word recognition skills by the end of Key Stage 1.

This begins in Nursery with opportunities to explore Phase 1 phonics, singing nursery rhymes, playing sound games and going on sound walks as well as following the Little Wandle progression.

In Reception the children will move onto Phase 2 following the Little Wandle progression that continues through Year 1. Where children need further support they access the Catch Up and Keep Up resources of Little Wandle. AS the children move into Year 2 and exit the phonics programme they continue to develop key skills of fluency, comprehension and prosody alongside their love of reading.

Phonics and Early Reading Policy

Little Wandle - information for Parents

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Programme progression

Phonics Check

The children in Year 1 will be expected to undertake the phonics screening check which is a short, light-touch assessment to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. We are confident in our teaching of phonics and will not put our children under pressure when they are preparing for the check. We will use the check to identify any children who will require further support to improve their reading skills.

It will identify the children who need extra help so they are given support by their school to improve their reading skills. They will then be able to retake the check so that schools can track pupils until they are able to decode.

The documents linked to on this page are in PDF format. If you are unable to open them then you can download a free PDF reader from Adobe.
Paper copies are available from the School Office.