Phonics & early Reading 

Ward End Primary School teaches Phonics and early reading using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Phonics and Early Reading programme. This scheme is accredited by the DfE. 

All teaching staff are trained on the programme.    

The progression of the scheme has been organised so that children are taught from the simple to more complex GPCs, as well as taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words. All the graphemes taught are practised in words, sentences, and fully decodable books. Children review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long-term memory.

Children learn to read as quickly as reasonably possible, so they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to the wide range of reading genres and authors as fluent, confident readers. The expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable through maintaining pace, practice and participation. Children who are not keeping up with their age-related expectations will be given additional practice immediately through keep-up sessions. 

Reading practice sessions are carried out 3 times a week, reading fully decodable books matched to the phonic knowledge levels of the children. 

For older children, the teaching of phonics and early reading skills continues using the Little Wandle Catch-up system for those children still needing this support.