Little Wandle

At St Austin’s Catholic Primary School, we teach Phonics through a scheme called Little Wandle Letter and Sounds Revised. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds, but has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme that meets all expectations of the National Curriculum.

Phonics is taught daily for children working at Phases 1-5, and from Phase 2 these children have an additional 3 reading practise sessions per week, to help build fluency in decoding.

Here is the link to the ‘For Parents’ section of the Little Wandle website.

The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their phonemes (sounds) and writing their graphemes (letters). There are also useful videos so you can see how your child is taught at school, to be able to confidently support their reading at home.

Overviews of the sounds that children will learn and in which half term:

Autumn 1

Autumn 2

Spring 1

Phonics Terminology

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.

Feel/watch how your mouth changes when you say a word, every time your mouth moves/changes shape you are saying a new phoneme, e.g. b-r-i-ck

There are 44 phonemes in the English language

Grapheme

Graphemes represent how a phoneme is spelt. Each grapheme is a unit of sound regardless of how many letters there are.

e.g. The word b-r-igh-t is made up of 4 phonemes; the igh phoneme is represented by 3 letters but only makes one phoneme.

A grapheme can represent more than one phoneme e.g. C = cat and city

Digraph

Two letters, which makes 1 phoneme. e.g. duck

A consonant digraph contains 2 consonants

e.g. sh ck th ll

A vowel digraph contains at least one vowel

e.g. ai ee ar oy

Split Digraph

A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent

e.g. make - a-e is a unit of sound (digraph)- it is being ‘split’ by the constant k.

Trigraph

Three letters, which make 1 phoneme. e.g. igh (light)

Oral blending

Hearing a series of spoken phonemes and merging them together to make a spoken word without corresponding to any graphemes

e.g. teacher says “b-u-s” children say “bus”

Blending (links to reading)

Recognising the letter sounds in a written word and merging them together in the order they are written to pronounce the word.

e.g. c-u-p = cup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5YUCPyC5I

Segmenting (links to writing)

Identifying the individual phonemes in a spoken word and writing them down to form a word.

Phonics Screening Check

In year 1, children will sit a national Phonics Screening where the children have to read 20 real words and 20 ‘alien’ (pseudo) words. This is conducted in a very child-friendly way by the class teachers. At every parents evening you will be informed of your child’s progress in Phonics and at the end of Year 1 the school report will inform you if they have passed or not. If your child does not pass in Year 1 they will be given additional support throughout Year 2 to enable them to pass the next year. We hold a parents workshop on the Phonics Screening check during Spring term (CoViD restriction dependant) where you will gain further information on this.

How the screening check is administered

The phonics screening check contains 40 words divided into two sections of 20 words. Both sections contain a mixture of real words and pseudo-words.

Revision for the Phonics Screening Check

If your child didn't pass the Phonics Screening Check in Y1, there is another opportunity in Y2. Here is a revision video of the sounds.

Useful Websites and Apps

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