Reading and Phonics at the Federation

Reading

At the Federation we strive to promote a love of reading for all. All pupils are encouraged daily to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world around them. We support/guide children to foster a love of reading through reading high quality, age-appropriate texts that are linked to the curriculum, represent a range of diverse backgrounds/experiences and reflect children’s personal choice in what they read.

To further inspire a love of reading, children have access to our well-stocked library to take books home, engage in daily class story time, have regular opportunities to read for pleasure, classroom book corners containing carefully selected texts, and assemblies linked to current affairs and that celebrate children as readers. The love of reading also reaches out of the school in which children take home a mixture of books related to their phonetic knowledge and quality texts to share with an adult at home weekly.

Furthermore, children are explicitly taught to read through our whole class reading curriculum. Within the curriculum, children access quality first teaching, including the modelling of fluent reading with prosody and language-rich discussions which are also modelled by the teacher. Children are taught comprehension skills simultaneously, so they are able to access a range of skills to understand what they read.

Through all of this, the children gain knowledge across the curriculum, become inquisitive readers and develop comprehension skills. By the end of a child’s education with us, it is our intention for them to read fluently, with expression and confidence while enjoying reading for pleasure, before they move into secondary education.

Phonics

The Little Wandle Phonics programme is our chosen systematic synthetic phonics programme which starts formally in Reception. In Nursery, the Little Wandle Foundations programme is used. These early phonics resources give children an initial exposure to the sounds and oral blending (fundamental skills for success in Phonics). They learn sounds in a playful and meaningful way and focus on developing the foundations for phonics, language and the love of reading ready for formal phonics teaching in Reception.

The basis of Little Wandle, which is a fully resourced programme, is to build on children’s knowledge of the alphabetic code. This code knowledge is used to apply the skills of: blending for reading (synthesising) and segmenting for spelling so that children can master reading and spelling as they move through school. In the programme, the learners gain an enriched vocabulary and develop their comprehension in the process of learning to read, spell and write in the English language.

Progression is carefully mapped out by the Little Wandle programme, through the classroom displays and the weekly Reading Practice Sessions. We follow the rigorous application of the teaching and learning cycle using cumulative code, words, sentences, spellings and reading books to apply the skills learnt. Reading Practice sessions take place alongside the phonics programme three times a week, providing groups of children with the opportunity to practise their decoding, prosody and comprehension skills in a supportive, teacher-led session. In Year 2 the phonics programme continues for the Autumn term before moving onto the ‘Bridge to Spelling’ and ‘Spelling programme’ which teach spelling using a phonetic approach.