Phonics

At Manor Park Infant and Nursery School, our Phonics and early reading is taught using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Phonics programme. Phonics is a method schools use to teach your child to read the sounds in words. It helps your child to learn to read quickly and skillfully and is an essential part of your child’s early education. Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme developed for schools by schools. It has been developed based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum for Reading, preparing your child to go beyond the expectations of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check and to provide your child with the knowledge and skills that they need to become a lifelong reader.

Nursery

During their time in Nursery children focus on Phase 1 phonics. This phase concentrates on children’s speaking and listening skills and lays the foundation for them to become successful readers and writers as they move up the school. Our priority in Nursery is to get children ‘tuned in’ to the sounds around them and develop their oral blending and segmenting skills. We embed our phonics learning throughout our provision and adults playfully lead small group sessions for the children to join. We further support children with the foundations for phonics through our skilful interactions. 

In 'foundations for phonics' we concentrate on the following aspects: 

• General sound discrimination – environmental, instrumental and body percussion. 
• Rhythm and rhyme 
• Alliteration 
• Voice sounds 
• Oral blending and segmenting. 

F2 - Reception

During their time in Reception, the children will take part in daily Phonics sessions which follow a systematic progression of phonics learning which will cover:

• all the phonemes of English words (Phase 2 and Phase 3 taught in F2)

• correct pronunciation of the phonemes

• all commonly occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (Phase 2 and Phase 3 taught in F2)

• the correct formation of all graphemes

• blending for reading

• segmenting for writing

• the sequenced learning of appropriate tricky words .

Once the children have learnt all the Phase 2 graphemes, they will be taught how to write capital letters.

Reading in F2 - Reception

When children are able to segment and blend, they will also take part in Reading Practice sessions. These sessions are run in small groups of around 6 children, are timetabled three times a week and taught by a trained adult. The book the children will be reading, will be carefully matched to their secure phonic knowledge.

The children will only begin these sessions once they are able to blend sounds to read simple words. As this happens at different times for children, some children will begin reading practice sessions sooner than others. Any child who cannot blend will be given additional blending practice every day until they can blend and can begin reading practice sessions.

Additional Support for Parents

Use the links below for resources to help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home. 

Phonics in Year 1

In Year 1, the children will continue to take part in daily Phonics sessions which follow a systematic progression of phonics learning which will cover:

• all the phonemes of English words (Phase 5 is taught in Year 1)

• correct pronunciation of the phonemes

• all commonly occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)

• the correct formation of all graphemes

• blending for reading

• segmenting for writing

• the sequenced learning of appropriate tricky words.

The children will initially recap Phase 3 and Phase 4 before moving on to learning Phase 5 grapheme phoneme correspondences.

Phonics progress is tracked closely during the lessons with more formal assessments undertaken half termly with 'keep up' intervention sessions implemented for any child who may be finding it difficult to stay on track.

How we teach

Reading at home:

Supporting your child with reading

Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home. There are two types of reading book that your child may bring home:

A Reading Practice book. This will be carefully matched to the appropriate phonic stage for your child. They should be able to read this fluently and independently. It is crucial that they have opportunities to read their book to develop fluency and prosody (expression) and also their understanding of the text (comprehension). Each book has activities inside the front and back cover to work on with your child as well as listening to them read the book.

Please listen to your child read and reread the book. Remember to give them lots of praise – celebrate their success! If they can’t read a word, encourage them to ‘soundtalk’ (segment and blend) the word. After they have finished, talk about the book together.

Reading for Pleasure book

In order to encourage your child to become a lifelong reader, it is important that they have many opportunities to read for pleasure. These books are for sharing.so please remember that you shouldn’t expect your child to read these books alone.

Read it to or with them. Discuss the illustrations, enjoy the story, predict what might happen next, use different voices for the characters, explore the facts in a non-fiction book. The main thing is that you have fun!

Reading and Phonics in Year 2

By the beginning of year 2, pupils should be able to read all common graphemes. They should be able to read unfamiliar words containing these graphemes, accurately and without undue hesitation, by sounding them out in books that are matched closely to each pupil’s level of word reading knowledge.

Phase 6 phonics takes place throughout Year 2, with the aim of children becoming fluent readers and accurate spellers.

Developing Reading Fluency:

Reading fluency is a child's ability to read a book or other text correctly, quickly, and with expression. A fluent reader doesn't have to stop and "decode" each word. Rather, most of the words can be read automatically. This means the reader can focus their attention on what the story or text means. For that reason, fluency is critically important — it is the bridge between decoding words and understanding what has been read.

At the end of Year 2, to be considered a fluent reader and therefore reach the 'expected standard' for reading, there is an expectation that your child should be able to read approximately: 90 words per minute.

Reading for meaning

When decoding is effortless, children can put all their energy and focus into understanding what they’re reading. But without automatic decoding, reading pace slows and children struggle to hold on to the bigger picture of the text. That’s where prosody bridges the gap. It gives the beginner reader insight into what reading for meaning should sound like. More importantly, it shows children how books can speak, and how words on the page can come to life.

Process of teaching prosody

    1, Book walk.

Look through the book together becoming familiar with characters names, key vocabulary and subject specific vocabulary explicitly understanding the meaning of any new vocabulary.

    2. Demonstrate reading with prosody.

Encourage children to draw explicit links between the way you read and how it aids comprehension. As an example: ‘How does my voice help us understand more about what I’m reading? Am I using my voice to properly communicate how this character feels?’ How does the punctuation help me?

3. Practice reading aloud.  

Re-reading books is a requirement of the National Curriculum and vital in developing prosody and comprehension.

4. Check for comprehension.

By listening to children read, teachers can identify links between how they read and how much of it they’re comprehending. We use appropriate questioning to check that children aren’t just mimicking as they read. For example, you might ask, “Why did you emphasise this word?” Children should be able to clearly explain their reasons: maybe they wanted to highlight a character’s emotions, create tension, or even just make the audience laugh.

     5. Prediction.

Once children begin to read for meaning they are able to make more accurate predictions about what will happen next.

Answering Comprehension Questions

1. Retrieval Questions

Children are taught to re-read short passages of the text to retrieve answers to spoken or written questions. To do this, children are also taught to skim read to find the correct section of the passage and re-read as many times as required to find the correct answer.

 2. Inference Questions:

Developing inference skills starts with the discussion of pictures.  

Once children get the hang of it, they can then move onto discussing short texts.

Reading for Pleasure

Ultimately, we want all children to develop a love of reading and become lifelong readers. To support this, we continue to use high quality class texts, weekly guided reading sessions and ongoing assessments to ensure interventions are planned for any child who needs further support in their reading journey.  

What can parents do?

Listen to your child read for at least ten minutes per day. The more practise they have at applying their reading skills, the more fluent they will become.

‘Buddy’ read with your child. Another easy way to help your child develop their fluency is to simply take it in turns to read aloud. You go first, as your reading provides a model of what good fluent reading sounds like. You'll notice that your child's reading will start to sound more and more like yours.

Ask questions about the story and pictures including inference and retrieval questions.

Be a good role model and show children your love of reading.

Share a story.

Visit the library regularly.