Welcome to Phonics and Early Reading at Gorsemoor.

Our aim is to provide a consistent approach to teaching phonics and reading that is accessible to all learners; supporting them to access all areas of our curriculum here, at Gorsemoor. Our scheme of choice, ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’, is enabling us to embed consistent early reading knowledge and skills across Phase 1. All staff members within Phase 1 have received full Little Wandle training and continue to access regular CPD. In order to maximise the opportunities for all children within Phase 1, we purchased beautiful resources to support our high-quality teaching, including the ‘revised’ Harper Collins decodable books suited to our new programme. 

Phonics – the key to a whole new world.

All about the phonics programme

Our school has chosen Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to support the teaching of phonics and early reading across Phase 1. We believe that this programme is best suited to our children as it is a programme that sets high expectations that are aspirational yet achievable for all. Following Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, for the duration of their time in Phase 1, will allow the children to utilise their phonic knowledge and blending skills consistently, ensuring fluency and confidence when reading.

What’s happening in school?

Nursery

Within our Nursery provision, we will be delivering the foundations for phonics using engaging activities that teach oral blending and phonemic awareness. We support language development and a love of reading through sharing high-quality stories, poems and nursery rhymes. These activities aim to develop focussed listening and attention skills and embed high-quality language within the children’s daily vocabulary.

Reception and Year 1

Our children in Reception and Year 1 will continue to have daily phonics lessons, learning new grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) each day. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme (sound) to a grapheme (written representation) and vice versa. The children will also learn a number of common exception words (tricky words) each year. These are words that cannot be sounded out using their phonemes.
 

Supporting your child at home.

Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on your child’s reading journey by continuing best practice at home.

Your child will bring home two books.  

• A reading practice book. This will be a phonetically decodable book that the children have practiced the week prior at school with their class teacher. By the time that this book comes home, we hope for the children to be over 90% fluent when reading this. We take ownership in teaching your child to read at Gorsemoor and want to ensure that we are building the children’s confidence to then continue to consolidate the taught GPCs at home with your support.
• A shared library book. We are so lucky to have opened our brand-new library here at Gorsemoor, offering a wide selection of children’s stories. This is a story book that you can get cosy to read to your child and share to support and develop the children’s love of reading and encourage them to become life-long readers.

Please see the table below with a brief overview of the structure of sounds taught and which year group the sounds are taught in.

Pronunciation support for parents

Photos of Little Wandle in action