Why is phonics the best method for teaching children to read?

Phonics makes learning to read easier, simpler and crucially gets children reading quicker. This helps to increase a child's confidence and instil a love of reading from an early age. Rather than memorising 1,000's of words individually, children are instead taught phonics. A strong phonic knowledge helps children work out how to read 95% of the English language.

If you didn't learn to read using phonics it can seem very complicated, but once the concept of words being made up of just 44 sounds is understood, children are able to make remarkably quick progress in their reading.

What is phonics?

Each one of the 26 letters in the alphabet has its own ‘sound'. This is very different to how a letter is ‘said' in the alphabet. There are more than 26 sounds in English language, in fact there are 44 sounds in total. Some of these sounds are made up of 2 or 3 letters. 2 letter sounds are called digraphs and three letter sounds are called trigraphs. It gets a bit more complicated than that too! For example the 'n' sound, like in 'nail' is also spelt ‘kn' like in ‘knot’ or ‘gn' like in ‘gnome’. The sound that children struggle to spot the most when breaking down words into its individual sounds is the 'split digraph'. Like a normal digraph, this is when two letters work together to make one sound, however with a split digraph, they are separated and have a letter in the middle. Fortunately ‘split digraphs' always end with an ‘e' which does make them a little easier to spot!

How do we teach Phonics

We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

Children continue to be taught using the Little Wandle programme in year 1 and into year 2 and KS2 if they did not reach the required standard in the year 1 phonics screening test.

Children’s progression in phonics is directly related to their reading ability. The Little Wandle programme has a thorough and consistent approach which interlinks both of these skills.

• The children are taught phonemes (the letter sounds) and how we recognise and read these in words and sentences. They are taught overt blending (sounding the word out), but fluent blending in their heads is the ultimate goal.
• The children are assessed regularly, which informs teachers of precise gaps so that they can respond quickly and effectively to children's next steps. 
• The children have daily phonics lessons and keep up sessions for children that have been identified as needing some additional support. 
• Guided reading is taught three times a week in year 1 and Reception.
• We use Big Cats phonics letters and sounds books which match the Little Wandle scheme. The books are completely decodable and matched to what is being taught in the lessons.
• The guiding reading sessions will focus on building the skills of decoding (applying knowledge of letters and sounds to read words), prosody (reading with expression) and comprehension (understanding and interpreting what they have read). Children will use the same book for each of these sessions with the aim to develop fluency by the end of the week. 
• The children will have the same book that they are reading in their practise sessions as their home reading book, and these will be changed once a week.

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  Little Wandle Resources for Parents

  For more information about how to pronounce the sounds please click here. Notice how the children don’t add an ‘uh’ sound at the end, so they say: ‘t’ not ‘tuh’. Use the downloadable information to help your child remember how to write their letters and say their sounds.

  Click here to watch videos and downloads that show parents how we teach your child specific aspects of phonics in class.

  Click here to access resources that will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home.

Reading at home:

Reading with your child at home is vitally important for a number of different reasons:

 

Each week, your child will bring home two books, one Big Cat phonics book, which will be closely matched to their phonics ability for them to practise their decoding, prosody and comprehension. They will be familiar with this book already from their guided reading sessions, but please practice reading this book daily, if you can, to develop confidence and fluency.

The second book will be a 'reading for pleasure' book from our library, which may be of a much higher reading level. Please enjoy reading this book together and sharing ideas around the characters, plot and predictions. 

These books are vital to our teaching and are very expensive too. We ask you to make sure that the books are returned to school every morning. 

If books are not returned, we will let you know. If books are still not returned, we will unfortunately have to charge for them to be replaced.

For further support, please visit the website below. This gives you information about how you can support phonics at home, how the sounds are pronounced, how we teach phonics and the books that will be coming home.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

 

Supporting your child with their reading:

Big Cat phonics book:

This book has been carefully matched to your child’s current reading level. If your child is reading it with little help, please don’t worry that it’s too easy – your child needs to develop fluency and confidence in reading.

Top tips:

• Listen to them read the book.
• Remember to give them lots of praise – celebrate their success!
• If they can’t read a word, ask them to say the sounds in the word, can they spot the digraphs (two letters that make one sound, for example, ai, ay, ee, oi). Can they blend the sounds to read the word? If not, read the word to them. 
• If they have had to decode lots of words within the sentence, they will benefit from re-reading the sentence to support their fluency and understanding. 
• After they have finished, talk about the book together. There are some questions you can explore at the back of the book. 

Library book:

In order to encourage your child to become a lifelong reader, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. The library book is a book they have chosen for you to enjoy together.

Please remember that you shouldn’t expect your child to read this alone. Read it to or with them:

• Discuss the pictures
• Predict what might happen next in the book
• Discuss how characters might be feeling
• Use different voices for the characters
• Explore the facts in a non-fiction book
• The main thing is that you have fun!
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