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At Whitefield Primary School, it is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and early reading is accessible to all learners, progressive and based on current best practice and research. We want our children to learn to read so that they all can read to learn.
At Whitefield Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised
At Whitefield Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.
We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
The programme overview shows the progression of GPCs and tricky words that we teach term-by-term. The progression has been organised so that children are taught from the simple to more complex GPCs, as well as taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words. All the graphemes taught are practised in words, sentences, and later on, in fully decodable books. Children review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long-term memory.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At Whitefield Primary School we also 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. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Monitoring and Evaulation of Phonics and Early Reading
Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Phonics and Early Reading Leader who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and they monitor and support our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. They work with staff to ensure the quality of provision and practice remains high.
The reading Leader attends all training updates and relevant webinars held by School Improvement Liverpool and Little Wandle. The Reading Leader uses the Little Wandle audit and prompt cards to regularly monitor and observe teaching,
The Reading Leader is released regularly to coach and lead the team through training, observation, monitoring, team teaching alongside staff, demonstration of best practice, demonstration lessons, reading sessions and interventions. This means there is a consistency of approach, phonics is taught to a consistently high standard and progression is maintained for all children.
The reading Leader and staff use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and plan immediate intervention.
Implementation
Foundations for phonics in Nursery
We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:
sharing high-quality stories and poems learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending, attention to high-quality language.
We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1
We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:
Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.
Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read
Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons 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.
We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.
If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.
Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions linked to phonics
We teach children to read through reading practice sessions. These are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children and use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids. Children are only exposed to books that contain words with sounds they are secure in are monitored by the class teacher.
Each reading practice session has 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.
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 Year 2 and for those having Catch-Up Sessions in KS2, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.
Home reading
The decodable reading practice books are taken home every week to share at home with an adult.This is the same book that the children have read in class. This means that children are confident to read this book with little support, at around 90% fluency.
We deliver workshops and model lessons for parents to understand how we teach their children to read
Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.
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 and teaching assistant 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.
Any new staff member has LW training as a part of their induction so that they can help with the delivery of LW teaching and learning.
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 Reading Leader and SLT regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and gaps in learning.
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.
We use the Little Wandle Flow chart to identify children at risk of falling behind
Summative assessment 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.
by SLT and scrutinised through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place.
Statutory assessment
Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics screening check. Any child not passing the check re- sits it in Year 2.
Ongoing assessment for Catch-up
Children in Year 2 to 6 are assessed through their teacher’s ongoing formative assessment
the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds placement assessment
the appropriate half-termly assessments.
Support for Parents/Carers - Phonics and Early Reading
It is essential that parents and carers understand the importance of phonics and home reading and how to support their children’s reading in a positive and enjoyable way. We know that nvesting time to develop reading relationships between home and school is crucial.
We engage Parents in the following ways:
Workshops are held for parents/carers. These are an ideal opportunity to provide clear messages about phonics and reading. We also run a workshop about the phonics screening, what to expect and how they can support their child at home.
Digital Classroom packed with information, key documents and videos to support
Weekly phonics home learning through weekly digital classroom and paper format
Access to Little Wandle Parent Support pages on their website
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