Thorpepark Academy’s approach to phonics:

Little Wandle is the scheme that is used from Nursery to Year 2. Phonic sessions are taught daily across our Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One. Those children who still have a phonic need will receive daily specific Little Wandle phonic interventions.

In addition to the daily phonics session, children in Foundation Stage Two, Year One and Year Two (Autumn term) participate in at least three reading practice sessions per week. This allows them to apply and practice the phonics knowledge they have learnt that week.

*Session 1- decoding

*Session 2- fluency and prosody

*Session 3- comprehension

As part of this approach, we use Collins Big Cat for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonically decodable books that have been specially designed to match the teaching and learning of the phonics programme. These books are carefully and precisely matched to the child’s secure phonic level to ensure a reading fluency level. This automaticity allows the child to then focus on what they are reading and their understanding of what they have read. These books are read in school three times before they are shared at home with parents and carers.

Any pupil who needs additional practice has daily keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up sessions match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures and resources, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every pupil secures their learning.

We timetable daily phonics lessons for pupils in Year 2 who are not fully fluent in reading, have gaps in their phonic knowledge or have not passed the Phonics Screening Check (taken at the end of Year 1). These pupils urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these. If any pupil in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

The progression of GPCs and tricky words that we teach term-by-term in our programme, along with support for phonics videos to show you how to pronounce the sounds, guidance on how children are taught to say sounds and how to support your child reading at home can be viewed by clicking on the link below.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Below are some useful documents about phonics, Little Wandle and supporting pupils to become life long readers.

Planning Documents: