At Willow Farm we teach Phonics using "Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised", which is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised has been extensively revised beyond the original Letters and Sounds to provide a complete teaching programme, meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.

Daily Phonics Sessions 

In Key Stage one, your child will be taught phonics every day. It is a fun, practical and interactive session that teaches the skills all children require to become good readers and writers.

The reading, including the teaching of systematic, synthetic phonics, is taught from the beginning of Reception. Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. This helps children to read words and to spell words using the corresponding written version (known as the graphemes). The children will then progress onto digraphs (two graphemes making one sound - th, ch, ng) and trigraphs (three graphemes making one sound '-igh', '-ure'). 

Our ongoing, 6-weekly assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind the programme’s pace. If any child does fall behind, targeted support is given immediately through daily 'keep up' sessions.

Every day in your child’s phonics lesson, they will be introduced to a new phoneme as well as revise previously taught phonemes. They will then be encouraged to recognise and use these phonemes in their reading and writing. In line with best practice, your child will bring home a reading book each week that contains taught phonemes to ensure that this new learning becomes fully embedded within their long-term memory.  The children read their reading book in a small group three times a week in school so should be wonderful fluent story tellers when the book comes home. 

Here is a link to the parents page on the Little Wandle website

For parents | Letters and Sounds (littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk)

Mrs Syalon has also created a presentation to explain more about our approach to phonics.

[Early Years Reading presentation] - PowerPoint Slide Show - [Early Years Reading presentation] (loom.com)

If you need any more information or support with phonics please do not hesitate to contact Mrs Blakey, who is our phonics lead in school.

bblakey@willowfarm.notts.sch.uk