'All individuals matter' 

At Winchelsea School, we believe that teaching children to be good, confident and fluent readers is an essential life skill. From when children start school in Reception, they are taught Phonics, which is understanding and applying letters and sounds in order to read and write.

We follow the ‘Little Wandle for Letters and Sounds’ program for teaching phonics.

You can view the Little Wandle website by following the link below. There is a parent page for you to access extra information on how you can support your child at home. 

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/

This is taught from Diamond class (Reception), through Year 1 and into Year 2 and beyond as needed. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP).

Using this SSP, we ensure that there is:

• direct teaching in frequent, short bursts
• consistency of approach
• secure, systematic progression in phonics learning
• maintaining pace of learning
• providing repeated practice
• application of phonics using matched decodable books
• early identification of children at risk of falling behind, linked to the provision of effective keep-up support

All children in Reception and KS1 have daily phonics sessions where they participate in speaking, listening and spelling activities that are matched to their developing needs. The teachers draw upon observations and continuous assessment to ensure children are stretched and challenged and to identify children who may need additional support. Children work through the different phases, learning and developing their phonics sounds and knowledge.

We recognise that systematic, high-quality phonics teaching is essential but additional skills and opportunities are needed for children to achieve the goal of being a well-rounded reader, namely comprehension.

In Reception, our Diamond children begin their reading journey with picture books, exploring the meaning of pictures, and when ready, they move onto phase 2 books and beyond, following the Little Wandle SSP.

In Year 1, our Opal class children are grouped after initial assessments are carried out. They are reassessed after each 5-week reading/phonics sequence.

These children have 3 group reading sessions a week: session 1 focuses on decoding, session 2 focuses on prosody and session 3 focuses on comprehension.