Phonics & Early Reading

Letters and Sounds

Phonics and Early Reading at

St Joseph’s

#Reading #Enrichment #Achievement

At St Joseph’s we use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics scheme. This ensures that ALL children are taught to read in exactly the same way. We aim for fluency in reading by the end of Key Stage 1.

Phonics starts in nursery with informal and playful activities based around listening, attention and oracy building the strong foundations ready for reception. Phase 1 phonics, at St Joseph’s consists of developing skills in:

  • Listening & Attention (Listening walks, sound identification with instruments and environmental sounds)

  • Rhythm & Rhyme (Sing rhymes, clap syllables and fill in missing words in rhymes and stories)

  • Alliteration (Running races, making silly soup, jumping jacks)

  • Oral segmenting & blending (Can you see a c-a-t?)

When they are ready, children move on to Foundations for Phonics which is part of the Little Wandle scheme. It continues to focus on listening, attention, oral segmenting and blending whilst developing phonological awareness to help prepare children for reception.

LS-Phonics-and-early-reading-policy-

Programme-Overview_Reception-and-Year-1

Below is a link to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised website. Here you will find videos and documents on how sounds are pronounced, videos on how phonics is taught and you will also find guidance on how best to support your child’s reading at home.

Parents of reception children are invited to a phonics workshop every Autumn term. They will have the opportunity to observe phonics being taught and support their children with some reading or phonics based activities.

Here are the sounds/phonemes the children in reception will learn.

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

Reception and year 1 have 3 reading practice sessions per week. They read books which align with their phonic knowledge and focus on decoding, prosody and comprehension. These books are also what the children bring home to read in order to develop fluency.