At Newhall Infant and Nursery School, we know that for all our children to become fluent readers and writers, phonics must be taught through a systematic and structured phonics programme.
To reflect the most up to date thinking on the effectiveness of phonics teaching, we transitioned to a new phonics scheme at Newhall in September 2022.
We’ve implemented the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme to plan and provide daily engaging phonics lessons.
In phonics, we teach children that the letters of the alphabet each represent a different sound, that these can be used in a variety of combinations and are put together to make words. The children learn to recognise all of the different sounds and combinations that they might see when they are reading or writing.
Our phonics teaching starts in Early Years and follows a specific sequence that allows our children to build on their previous phonics knowledge and master specific phonics strategies as they move through school.
An important part of phonics teaching to be aware of when supporting your child at home, is the precise pronunciation of the sounds taught. It’s vital that only pure sounds are used and that ‘uh’ is not added to sounds, for example, pronouncing the ‘m’ sound as ‘muh’. Please see the videos below to hear how each sound pronounced correctly.
As mentioned earlier we teach children that the letters of the alphabet each represent a different sound, that these can be used in a variety of combinations and are put together to make words. The children are taught to blend these sounds to read words. The video below demonstrates how the children are taught the skill of blending.
The children are also taught to read tricky words in phonics lessons.
Tricky words are words that cannot be sounded out easily. They are common words that have complex spellings in them.
The video below demonstrates how the children are taught to read tricky words.
In Year 1, during the summer term, children take part in a phonics screening check to assess their understanding of the different sounds taught and their ability to apply this to blending and reading words.
The check, which lasts 5-10 minutes and is administered 1:1 by each child’s teacher, requires pupils to read aloud forty words. To pass, they must correctly read aloud 32/40 of the words. Some of the words in the check are harder than others, and some aren’t actual words with any meaning, but made-up (alien) words. These made up words are used to see if children can apply their ability to decode sounds to correctly read them. This will ensure they can apply the same principles to learning new words as their vocabulary grows.
With Little Wandle children will read a practice book each week in school, with three different aspects of reading teaching being applied to that book. The book will be at the correct phonic stage for your child and as such will be ‘fully decodable’ using the sounds they have become secure in during phonics teaching in the previous half term.
As well as reading with the goal of learning to read, it is so important to encourage your child to read for pleasure.
We encourage you to share a wide selection of books at home with your child. The impact of bedtime stories and sharing books at home on both literacy progress and children’s wellbeing is well documented.