A lot of things will remain the same. The children are already having daily phonics sessions. Reception will continue with this session but Year 1 will now have 2 sessions per day. At Hampton Hargate Primary School, we follow the 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ Department for Education validated SSP scheme. From Reception, children will take part in daily 20-minute Phonics lessons,. The lessons take the format of: Write down some words get children to read and then cut up words into graphemes or use the flashcards (e.g. snail would be cut up into 's-n-ai-l' to include digraph. Then get children to reassemble word correctly. They may then like to think of rhyming words and have a go at spelling these. This could lead to a discussion about how different graphemes can represent the same sound (e.g. a_e in whale).

Collins Big Cat Phonics - Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised | Big Cat for Little Wandle Fluency Sets A booklet titled ' St Francis Church of England Primary School - EYFS.KS1 Reading Procedures LW.LS' is another useful document that will highlight how our phonics and early reading teaching weaves together. This is the focus on children applying their phonics knowledge into reading books. Childrencould cut out any graphemes they find in magazines or newspapers and use them to spell words. Play splat. Choose graphemes/words (about 5 or 6) to write on a piece of paper and then call out one of the words. The first one to 'splat' the correct word or grapheme wins a point. Change words/graphemes after a certain time. We want children to become lifelong readers, therefore it is essential that they are encouraged to read for pleasure. The desire of wanting to read will help with the skill of reading. To help foster a love of reading, children should take a book home that they can share and enjoy with their parent/carer. Involving the children in the choice of this book is important. These books offer a wealth of opportunities for talking about the pictures and enjoying the story. We want to offer a variety of books, including non-fiction, so they can enjoy a range of writing. Parents/carers need to understand that they should not expect their child to read this book independently and certainly should not try to get their child to do so. The book is for the parent/carer to read to or with the child. Again, it is good to talk about the book with the child, but important not to turn the discussion into a test. The goal is enjoyment. Lots of opportunities should be provided for children to engage with books that fire their imagination and interest. Enjoying and sharing books leads to children seeing them as a source of pleasure and interest and motivates them to value reading.We support this further from year 2 and in Key Stage 2 with our spellings programme and weekly SPAG lessons in Year 3 upwards. We continue to support children with ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ through Key Stage 2 where needed. Many of us know and love Letters and Sounds and have worked hard to make it successful in our settings. We have gathered materials and created resources to teach it as well as we can. When Letters and Sounds was created in 2007, it gave us all the structure and training to teach children to read using Systematic Synthetic Phonics. Its structure and planning gave us an overarching progression and pedagogy, which many schools have used and leaned on ever since. We would encourage you to support your child’s reading journey by listening to them read at home as often as possible. Children in year 2 and beyond also take part in similar reading practise or guided reading sessions every week to develop their reading skills once they are secure with phonics. As of 10th July 2021 Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a phonics programme validated by the Department for Education.

A library book. Children choose any book from our library. This book is usually above their reading level so is a book to share together with you reading to your child. Library books are changed regularly, subject to the library being accessible. At Hampton Hargate Primary, children begin to read in Reception using Phonics. We use the DfE approved systematic synthetic Phonics (SSP) scheme, ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ , where children concentrate on speaking and listening skills, preparing them for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. The teaching of Phonics involves introducing the children to the correct terminology to help build their skills and work more independently with their reading. Match the picture. Select pictures from magazine or online and practise oral blending i.e. a picture of a beach, the child will need to orally sound out ‘ b-ea-ch’. You can also show some pictures and then cards showing words to match the picture and the child has to match the word with the correct picture once they have sounded it out and blended.

Reading practise is an integral part of the ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ scheme. Each week the children will have further opportunities, as part of the ‘Practise and apply’ section of their phonics lesson, to embed their learning of new sounds and to practise the decoding skills they have learnt. Each week your child will have access to two types of reading material: Segmenting –identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and being able to write down the letters for each sound i.e. him h-i-m. A colour book-banded reading book which is fully decodable. Children should be able to sound out any words that they are unsure of, enabling them to build further confidence when reading. This continues our practice of children taking home a physical book, matched to their reading level. As the children revisit the phase 3 graphemes they will learn a catchphrase to match the sounds. These become even more important when we start learning alternative spellings for the same grapheme.

It is really important that the sounds are said clearly and without any other sound attached. When sounds are not said correctly, it can confuse children and they can sometimes struggle to put the sounds together to make the word. From November 2021, we are introducing a new phonics scheme called Little Wandle Letters & Sounds Revised 2021. It follows the same progression of sounds as our existing scheme but this includes fully decodable books. Our combined phonics and reading programmes follow guidance set out in the government’s new Reading Framework which outlines the huge importance of building children’s fluency in reading, expanding language and creating a love of reading. Research shows that creating able readers really is the key to allowing children to succeed in all areas of their learning.We teach with each book three times and through this repeated reading children are taught to read with expression and understanding. This means that the books we use need to be of the best quality. They need to be fully decodable and matched to our progression, but they need to connect with our children too. If we want our children to see reading as something that is worth putting all that hard work into, then we need to make learning to read worth it. Books should be mirrors of our lives and doors that open into the world, even the very first books we teach children to read with. If we make learning to read a pleasure and children feel that reading has purpose then we are fostering readers for life.

We will no longer to individual reading in class. The children will have 3 reading sessions a week with a teacher or TA. Each reading session will focus on different things. I know this is a lot of information so if you have any questions then please ask. We offered a google meeting to share this information and to answer any questions. Practise– using the sound in words – Spotting the new phoneme in words, modelling blending and then allowing the children to read words with the new sound from flashcards? Bingo. Children should divide paper into 6 sections and write a grapheme in each. You may then choose flashcards (either home-made or printed) for the children to cross off their board. Give bonus point if they can say the sound before you do. The same game can be adapted to play with real or nonsense words. During all lessons, children are encouraged to use the Grapheme Mats (Grow the Code)’’in the classroom to help them to make phonetically plausible decisions with their independent writing.

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For more information about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, book your free spot for their first briefing of the new school year on 2nd September 2021 at 3.45pm.