Phonics & Early Reading

At Scarcroft Primary School it is our intent that every child become a fluent, confident and engaged reader. Reading is at the heart of all our teaching at Scarcroft and we support our children in developing a love of reading through a wealth of stories, poems, rhyme and non-fiction text.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised

Phonics is the core of our early reading learning and we have recently invested in Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised to ensure consistency, fidelity and rigour of phonics teaching throughout school.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP). 

Find out more on their website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Phonics

Children have a daily phonics lesson from early in Reception which follows the progression for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds and this continues in Year One to ensure children become fluent readers. We usually teach four new phonemes and their corresponding graphemes each week (grapheme phoneme correspondence or GPC) and they are then used in the final lesson of the week to review the week’s learning. Children will also learn tricky words during these sessions.

In the Autumn and Spring term, Reception children learn phase 2 and phase 3 GPCs and in the summer term learn phase 4. Year 1 begin the Autumn term with revision of phases 2, 3 and 4 before learning phase 5, which will be completed by the end of the year. Year 2 children will begin the year by revisiting phase 5 and other previously taught phases to ensure all children are completely confident with applying these GPCs in both their reading and also their writing.

Reading Practice Sessions

Children take part in reading practice sessions at school three times a week. We look at the same book in each session and focus on a different aspect of reading, enabling children to become fluent readers:

Session 1: Decoding – sounding out and blending the individual words

Session 2: Prosody – reading with rhythm, stress and intonation

Session 3: Comprehension

Reading at Home

Each week your child will bring home two books: one book will be decodable for them to practise their phonics and reading skills, please continue to ask them lots of questions such as what is happening in the picture, who is wearing a hat, what might happen next etc? 

The second book will be from our library as a ‘high quality text’ which we ask you to read to the children and share the pleasure of a book together.

Find our more about how you can support your child with this here:

Assessment

Each half term all children in Reception and Year 1 are assessed to help inform future teaching and help identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge and need additional practice. Daily assessment of learning also takes place within the classroom so staff can quickly identify any children who are in danger of falling behind and provide the appropriate daily ‘Keep Up’ intervention.

At the end of Year 1, children complete a ‘phonics screening check’ set by the government to check their progress with phonics. Whilst this is a formal assessment, the children are used to working 1:1 with their class teacher on this sort of assessment and the children enjoy showing off what they are able to do!