Phonics at West Minster Primary

Welcome to Phonics at West Minster Primary!  

We are in our third year of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme and we are seeing positive progress within our early readers.

The children at West Minster begin their Little Wandle journey in Nursery where they are taught the skills to tune in their listening skills through singing nursery rhymes, following actions songs, playing listening games and having exposure to good quality story time books. All these activities not only support the development of the children’s listening skills they also have an impact on their language and literacy skills giving them a good foundation to start from for when they move into the Reception year.

Reception children continue this phonics learning journey from week 2 of their first term. Reception children are taught daily phonics starting from 10 minutes each day building up to 30 minutes as they progress through their school year. Reception year are taught phase 2 and 3 sounds which will support their reading and writing skills.  Near the end of Reception year, the children will move on to phase 4, this phase builds on the children’s learning and introduces consonant blended words.

In year one the children will spend the first term recapping their phase 3 and 4 sounds before being taught to read and spell words using the phase 5 sounds with fluency and accuracy.

To help support our children’s learning at home we send a weekly home learning sheet showing the sounds and words that have been learnt. This is to further support the children’s learning and embed their phonics knowledge and reading skills.

Early Reading at West Minster Primary

Alongside our phonics lessons we also run our guided reading sessions which are linked to the phonics sounds the children are learning. This embeds the learning and gives context to the phonics lessons.  At West Minster Primary we have the Little Wandle Big Cat Collins decodable books, these books are used in our guided reading sessions in Reception and Year 1. Children will bring home the book they have read in their guided reading sessions to continue their reading practice and to show their progress.

Support for additional reading

Children who are identified to require some additional reading support in Reception or Year 1 will be part of the Daily Catch- up sessions; where a trained member of staff, usually the Teaching Assistant, will teach the children a recap lesson.

Those children identified in Year 2 – 6 to need some additional support will be taught using the Little Wandle Rapid Catch-up programme.  We use the Rapid Catch-up assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Rapid Catch-up resources – at pace.  These short, sharp lessons last 15-20 minutes daily and have been designed to ensure children quickly catch up to age-related expectations in reading. The children will be assigned a reading book matched to the sounds they have been taught that week to keep practicing with at home.

Useful weblinks

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

This is the weblink for the Little Wandle website which should take you to the ‘parent’ tab. This has lots of information, videos and resources you can use at home to support your child’s early reading and phonics experiences.

It also has links to the Collins website where you can find out more about the resources we use and how you could play the games at home.

Here are a few examples of the type of books that the children will be reading, there is a mixture of fiction (story based) books and Non-Fiction (Information based) books.