Phonics and Early Reading
At St. Peter’s Primary Academy, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and 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.
To support your child’s reading at home, each week your child will bring home:
A Little Wandle phonics based reading book - this book is matched to your child’s reading level and the sounds they know.
A choice reading book - this is a book for you to share with your child. Each week, the children are given the opportunity to choose a book from our KS1 travelling library. It is important that these books are shared for pleasure and should be read to your child.
A home learning sheet - this will share the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (written form) your child has learnt that week alongside any tricky words and spellings. These can be shared and revised with your child, allowing them to share their learning journey with you at home.
The Little Wandle website has a Parent Page that you can access to support your child’s reading at home.The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home.
Once your child has secure understanding and application, they will progress in their reading onto wider reading scheme books to support their learning to read. The teaching and organisation of reading will be the same as above but they will utilise different reading resources to support their progression.
For these children, they will be moved on to colour-banded reading schemes with texts from either Oxford Reading Tree or Big Cat Phonics which both use a phonic-based approach, alongside the teaching of comprehension in more complex texts.