Early Reading
INTENT
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as preparing children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven. The school uses the same programme from our associated infant school. We identify and support the children that come from KS1 with a phonics deficit to enable them to decode fluently.
IMPLEMENTATION
Staff have received the relevant phonic knowledge and skills training to identify gaps in children’s knowledge and to implement programmes accordingly. Phonics is taught within a highly structured programme of daily lessons across year 3 as part of the transition from KS1 to KS2 in groups differentiated according to children’s phonic awareness and development stage. We identify the needs and respond to them. The inclusion team have phonics specialists to deliver targeted intervention sessions for identified pupils.
The six overlapping phases based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers.
Phase One
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Phase Two
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three
The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump
Phase Five
Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Phase Six
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
Following professional transition discussions and initial assessments Year 3 teachers identify the children they think need support with their phonics. Our phonics specialists then carry out a phonics screening to identify gaps and begin interventions. 13 children in year 2 did not pass their phonics test so requires a phonics intervention this year.
Children who enter the school mid-year are assessed by their class teachers and also put forward for phonics screening if needed. Children are reassessed against initial benchmarks to measure progress. Phonics interventions continue for as long as the child requires it.
Whilst phonics is a very important element in learning to decode, other skills are also taught such as reading for meaning, using context clues and ensuring pupils develop their sight vocabulary. Other strategies such as the use of Sound Linkage, an ‘integrated programme’ is used to overcome reading difficulties. The tests create a profile of a child's strengths and weaknesses in phonological awareness, and are used to determine a child's point of entry to the training activities.
IMPACT
Through the teaching of systematic phonics, children become fluent in using phonics to support their reading ability so that by the end of KS2 they read at an expected standard. This way, children can focus on developing their comprehension and enjoyment of reading as they move through the school. We firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments. As a junior school, MJS is aware of all pupils who did not pass the phonics screening in Y1 and Y2, by the end of Year 3, 100% of these children have improved fluency and can read with increasing confidence.