At Skol Nansledan, we prioritise the teaching of reading skills and enjoyment of literature, enabling children to become lifelong, confident readers. As children build fluency, comprehension skills become our main area of focus and questioning looks at skills such as retelling, inference and prediction.
We believe through reading, pupils will have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. We feel that reading enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know.
Our intent is to:
- Ensure that every child receives daily Phonic input.
- Ensure that every child possesses a developing phonic knowledge that they can independently apply; enhancing spelling skills through carefully planned practice, rigorous assessment and intervention.
- Instil confidence in every child with their encoding and decoding skills.
- Provide all pupils with opportunities to deepen their understanding through applying their skills across all areas of the curriculum.
- Acquire a wide vocabulary and understanding of the conventions of reading
- Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
- Celebrate children achievements with their developments
The working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. The understanding that the letter on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This begins with phonics teaching in early years.
At Skol Nansledan, we use a systematic synthetic phonics programme to teach reading called 'Little Wandle'. As children progress and can decode fluently they move onto the Literacy and Language scheme which develops children’s comprehension, vocabulary, writing, critical thinking and discussion skills and grammar – in a fun and meaningful way.
Little Wandle is a method of teaching reading which is centred around learning the sounds (phonemes) of the letters (graphemes), and then blending them together to read words. The children also learn to break down words (segment) into individual sounds in order to write them.
How it works
At Nanseldan school 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 is based on the original Letters and Sounds, but has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.
Daily Taught Phonics Session
Each day your child will be taught Phonics. This is a fun, practical and interactive session that teaches the skills of oral segmenting and blending 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 graphemes (the written corresponding sound). The children will then progress onto digraphs (sounds made up to two letters such as 'sh' and 'ch) and trigraphs (sounds made up of three letters such as 'igh' and 'ear').
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.
Each day in your child’s Phonic 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 practise, your child will be bringing home reading books that contain taught phonemes to ensure that this new learning becomes fully embedded within their orthographic memory (long-term memory).
Reading
At Nansledan school children learn to read by blending sounds together, they read words containing sounds that they have already been taught. All of our Little Wandle reading books are fully decodable and allow the children to read using the skills they have learned in their phonics lessons.
Our Little Wandle books are bright, colourful and engaging books that cover a range of genres including fiction and non-fiction.
Children have 3 reading sessions a week, using the weekly phonics book that they take home. These reading sessions are delivered by a fully trained adult and follow the Little Wandle reading sequence.
Reading session 1: Decoding
Reading session 2: Prosody
Reading session 3: Comprehension
The guidance for these sessions can be found in the back of each reading book, so can be easily repeated at home, to support your children's' phonic development and learning.
Writing
Our phonics sessions allow the children to spell words by sounding them out and then writing the corresponding graphemes. Children also learn to write simple, and then increasingly complex sentences containing a range of written letters (graphemes) and tricky words.
