Phonics and Early Reading

At Canon Burrows Primary School, our Phonics and early reading is taught using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Phonics programme. Phonics is used to teach our children to read the sounds in words. It helps them to learn to read quickly and skillfully and is an essential part of their early education. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme. It prepares our children to go beyond the expectations of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check and provides them with the knowledge and skills that they need to become a lifelong reader!

Nursery

In Nursery, we focus on Phase 1 phonics. This phase concentrates on children’s speaking and listening skills and lays the foundation for them to become successful readers and writers as they move up the school. Our priority in Nursery is to get children ‘tuned in’ to the sounds around them and develop their oral blending and segmenting skills. We embed our phonics learning throughout our provision and adults playfully lead sessions for the children. We further support children with the foundations for phonics through skillful interactions. 

In 'foundations for phonics' we concentrate on the following aspects: 

• General sound discrimination – environmental, instrumental and body percussion. 
• Rhythm and rhyme 
• Alliteration 
• Voice sounds 
• Oral blending and segmenting. 

Reception

In Reception the children will take part in daily Phonics sessions which follow a systematic progression of phonics learning which will cover:

• All the phonemes of English words (Phase 2 and Phase 3)
• Correct pronunciation of the phonemes
• All commonly occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)
• The correct formation of all graphemes
• Blending for reading
• Segmenting for writing
• The sequenced learning of appropriate tricky words

Year 1

In Year 1 the children will continue to take part in daily Phonics sessions which follow a systematic progression of phonics learning. lnitially they will recap Phase 3 and Phase 4 before moving on to learning Phase 5 grapheme phoneme correspondences, which will cover:

• All the phonemes of English words (Phase 5)
• Correct pronunciation of the phonemes
• All commonly occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)
• The correct formation of all graphemes
• Blending for reading
• Segmenting for writing
• The sequenced learning of appropriate tricky words

Click the picture below to see the Reception and Year 1 overview.

Reading Practice Sessions

When the children are able to segment and blend, they will also take part in Reading Practice sessions. These sessions are run in small groups of around 6 children, are timetabled three times a week and taught by a trained adult. The book the children will be reading, will be carefully matched to their secure phonic knowledge.

The children will only begin these sessions once they are able to blend sounds to read simple words. As this happens at different times for children, some children will begin reading practice sessions sooner than others. Any child who cannot blend will be given additional blending practice every day until they can blend and can begin reading practice sessions. 

Alongside the children's reading book, they will also bring home a sharing book. The sharing book is a book each child has chosen to enjoy with a family member at home. In order to encourage our children to become a lifelong readers, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. We encourage parents to read it to or with them. Discuss the pictures, enjoy the story, predict what might happen next, use different voices for the characters, explore the facts in a non-fiction book. The main thing is that everybody reading is fun!

Additional Support

Use the videos below for resources to help you support your child with pronunciating their sounds.

For more information about the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Phonics programme, including pronunciation and formation phrases, visit the link below:

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/