Phonics Lead Mrs H Mathieson

Phonics

Vision

In line with the National Curriculum for English, we believe that phonics gives every child the essential key to unlock words, stories, and ideas — it’s where a lifelong love of reading and learning begins. High-quality, systematic phonics teaching enables children to develop fluency, accuracy, and confidence in reading and writing.

At our school, we are passionate about making phonics fun, engaging, and meaningful. When children enjoy learning to read, they develop not only strong literacy skills but also a genuine pleasure in reading for its own sake. Through phonics and shared reading experiences, children discover the joy of stories, imagination, and language.

Phonics also helps our children grow as individuals and as learners. As they explore new sounds, we see the children show service when they support their classmates, hope as each new sound opens the door to new stories and possibilities, integrity appears in their honesty, effort, and determination. Nurture is evident in the care teachers and children show one another and through steady progress and perseverance, children strive for excellence—becoming confident, joyful readers.

By fostering both skill and enjoyment, we give every child the confidence to become a fluent, enthusiastic, and lifelong reader.

Little Wandle

We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds as our phonics programme.

“The Little Wandle programme provides a full progression through all commonly occurring GPCs* (sounds), working from simple to more complex, and taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words.”

The scheme uses the latest research into how children learn best; how to ensure learning stays in children’s long term memory and how best to enable children to apply their learning to become highly competent readers. We follow the programme through from Pre-school, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, with children able to have extra support as needed. We want our children to become fluent and competent readers, able to read a range of texts and to be able to develop a love of reading and stories.

Please look at the Little Wandle support pages for parents for information about the sounds taught at each stage, how to say the sounds, and ways to support your children at home.

For parents | Letters and Sounds