Phonics & Early Reading at St Augustine’s
Intent
At St. Augustine’s, we recognise that mastery in phonics is fundamental to children being able to access a broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts across the curriculum. We aim to achieve this by teaching phonics systematically with a relentless drive to address the needs of all learners.
Implementation
We have implemented the systematic synthetic phonics programme ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’; this is a method of learning letter sounds and blending them together to read and write words.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP). We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Reception and Year 1. It is vitally important that children review and revisit Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children’s long-term memory. Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills.
Children need to learn to read as quickly and reasonably as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, opening up new worlds and adventures to them. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable; children who are not keeping up with their peers will be given additional practise immediately through keep-up sessions.
Children enjoy a range of multi-sensory resources to support their phonics learning. On-going assessment of children’s progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are fully decodable and matched to children’s secure phonics knowledge. As well as fully decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading and language; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using fully phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading.
The table below is a summary based on the phonics progression:
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| Phase One (Nursery) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Phase Two (Reception) Autumn 1 and 2 | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three (Reception) Spring 1 and 2 | Graphemes such as ai, ee, igh representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Phase Four (Reception) Summer 1 and 2 | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters in line with the National Curriculum. |
Impact
By the end of Year 1, the vast majority of children are able to read fluently. This means they can read at least 90% of words in a decodable book. The quality of teaching and learning in Phonics and Early Reading is monitored regularly. Staff and given opportunities to refresh their knowledge and understanding of the Little Wandle SSP through the use of their in depth video training modules. Phonics and Early Reading is assessed half termly to ensure teaching is pitched accordingly. For those children who require more support, ‘Keep Up’ intervention sessions are delivered daily in Reception and Year 1. Children in Year 2 who are not yet fluent readers are offered intervention sessions following the ‘Catch Up’ programme.
Supporting Documents
Policy –
LW Phonics and Early Reading Policy 22
Progression Overviews –
Little Wandle Phonics Overview – Reception
Little Wandle Phonics Overview – Year 1
Support for Parents
You can find resources to support your child with their letter sounds, reading and letter formation by visiting the Little Wandle website – https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
See the Powerpoint below from our most recent EYFS/KS1 Parent Workshop
More support below:
Capital_letter_formation (1) Pronunciation_guide_Reception 1 Pronunciation_guide_Reception 2 LS-Grapheme-info-sheet-Phase-3-Reception 3
Reading Expectations at St Augustine’s
We expect every child to read to an adult at home on a daily basis for 10 to 20 minutes. Whilst this is only an expectation, we hope you appreciate the impact this can have on your child’s education. We do appreciate that life is very busy and sometimes it might not be possible to listen to your child read every day. We have reward systems in place to encourage your child to read at home. We cannot emphasise the enough the importance of sharing stories with your child-children are never too old for bedtime stories.
Looking for a new book to read?
Take a look on the Book Trust’s Great Books Guide for inspiration -click on the link below.
https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/our-recommendations/great-books-guide
