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 skillful 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.