At Albany Infant and Nursery School, we provide our children with roots to grow and wings to fly. We want all of our children to immerse themselves into texts of different genres, to develop a love of reading and writing. It is therefore fundamental that we provide and equip all of our children with the skills to enable them to become successful, life-long learners. This is achieved through the teaching of phonics and reading, which is accessible to all learners, regardless of background.

Phonics is the teaching of connections between the sounds of our spoken words and the letters that are used to write them down. Here at Albany Infant and Nursery School, we teach early reading and spelling through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic synthetic phonics programme. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside 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.

We start teaching Little Wandle Foundations in our Nursery and then, from Reception, we 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.

We believe that the priority in Nursery should be to build the foundations for phonics for all children. For this reason, our children in Nursery have daily discrete phonics lessons which allow us to devote more time to working with children who need extra help to develop the skills and behaviours that underpin successful reading. Little Wandle Foundations is aligned to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) statutory framework as well as the non-statutory guidance on Development Matters and Birth to 5 Matters. It provides a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for communication and language and literacy. This enables our Nursery children to be well-prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending when they move into Reception.

Children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 are taught to read in whole class daily phonics lessons. Children are systematically taught the phonemes (sounds), using a multi-sensory approach, including the use of mnemonics, to make learning stick. In these daily phonic sessions, children are encouraged to blend the sounds for reading and segment the sounds for writing. 

Children are taught:

• the grapheme-phoneme correspondence in a clearly defined sequence
• the skill of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell
• that blending and segmenting are reversible processes
• gradual teaching of high frequency and ‘tricky’ words – those which are not phonetically regular
• alternative graphemes that represent different sounds for example the ‘sh’ in words such as: mansion, chef and special.

In providing clear and structured progressive sequences, our children have the tools and skills to be able to read and write independently at an early age and are given lots of opportunities to apply their phonic skills throughout a rich and varied curriculum.

Teachers use formative assessment on a daily basis to identify any children who may need further practice in the daily ‘Keep Up’ session, which is timetabled later on in the day. Where children find a particular aspect tricky, or have not quite kept up with the pace and progression of the phonics lessons, they take part in these ‘Keep Up’ sessions to ensure that any gaps in their phonic knowledge are filled and embedded. Teachers also carry out summative assessments each half-term. These formal assessments review the taught GPCs and the child’s ability to segment and blend words, as well as identify ‘tricky’ words. The results from these assessments are then used to tailor interventions, where necessary, and provide targeted support through the teaching of Little Wandle ‘Catch Up’ phonics.

At the end of Year 1, children complete a Phonics Screening Check, as required by the Government. This check is to assess how well children can segment, blend and read words through the application of their phonics knowledge. More information about the Phonics Screening Check will be shared with families when children are in Year 1.

For further information about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, or to find out other ways that you can support your child with phonics at home, please click on the following link that will take you to the parents’ section of their website.

To complement our phonics scheme, we use reading books from the Big Cat Collins Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme. Children in Reception will have two books that they engage with, both in and out of school. The first book will be closely matched to their phonics assessment and the second text is one that the child will have chosen for their reading for pleasure book. Both of these books are changed on a weekly basis and engagement with reading at home is highly encouraged. Families are encouraged to support and engage with their child’s reading journey and enable them to further practice at home. For each read at home, our children receive a stamp and a reading token which is collected as a class and goes towards a whole class reward.

In Year 1 and Year 2 we have daily reading practice sessions using texts from the Big Cat Collins range. In these reading sessions, teachers use texts which are matched to children’s phonics knowledge and the assessments that are carried out each half-term. Each lesson is taught by a fully trained adult and 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: teaching children to use phonic knowledge to read words
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: using dialogic talk to help children to understand the text.

Similarly, for children in Reception, our Key Stage 1 children will also have two books that they take home each week. One linked to their phonics assessment and one that they have chosen to read for pleasure, from our school library. Family engagement and support with reading is fundamental. Therefore, all children are encouraged to read at home at least four times per week and reading tokens are awarded for each practice at home. Once children reach the final stages of our phonics scheme, they will be able to choose from a wider range of books including chapter books and well-known classics.

We never want a child’s love of reading to fade away and that is why we choose high-quality and diverse books that engage our children. Through reading and our curriculum, we strive to provide our children with knowledge and experiences that reflect our community as well as provide texts which are open windows and mirrors into other worlds and cultures.

To find out more about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds, please click on the link below:

For parents | Letters and Sounds