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Phonics and Early Reading
Phonics is a fundamental part of learning to read and write. It helps us understand the relationship between letters and sounds, laying the foundation for fluent reading and writing.
Our Phonics curriculum, based on the Little Wandle scheme, is designed to:
- Encourage a love for reading and a curiosity about how words are built
- Build confidence in recognising sounds blending them to read, and segmenting them to write
- Build confidence and skill in reading fluently with prosody
- Develop skills in phoneme recognition, decoding, and spelling
- Support working independently and collaboratively in phonics activities
Our curriculum follows the Little Wandle scheme, offering a clear, systematic approach to phonics instruction. We use engaging lessons and activities to teach letter sounds, blending, and segmenting in a fun and effective way. By focusing on daily structured phonics practice and applying these skills to reading and writing tasks, children build a strong foundation for literacy and develop a love for reading.
Phonics
At New Park we use a systematic synthetic phonics programme called Little Wandle to teach children to recognise letters and their associated sounds. Children will be taught new sounds each week.
The links below will take you to some videos which will show you how we teach phonics in reception class and there is more information available using the links at the bottom of the page.
Reading
Reading
Developing accomplished and confident readers is critical to our success. All children follow a levelled reading scheme as they develop their decoding and comprehension skills and every child reads aloud to an adult at least once per week. In EYFS and KS1, and for older children who are in the early stages of reading, children read aloud to an adult more frequently. Every child takes two books on loan from the school library at a time; one book that is chosen by the child and one levelled book that matches the child’s phonological development.
Novel study
The development of core English skills (Oracy, Reading, Writing, Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling) flows from our “Novel Study” approach. Children in every year group spend extended periods of time studying high-quality texts (both picture books and novels) and from these develop insight, empathy and nuanced degrees of comprehension and inference. Children become the protagonists in the texts they study, experiencing the same emotions, dilemmas and character traits. This in-turn helps them learn to be passionate and creative writers, drawing on a rich history of literature to create their own works. Books are carefully chosen to introduce children to diverse cultures, time periods, character arcs and storytelling devices. Deep analysis of literature enables children to access the big questions about life and exploration of character, theme, setting and plot allows children to wrestle with and respond to challenging situations and emotions in a safe and secure environment.
Children’s writing develops holistically as a natural and meaningful response to reading the chosen text. The quality and range of responses reflect a deeper understanding of language and context. Children are introduced to text types that link to the text they are studying eg. persuasive letters to characters, diary entries and newspaper reports. Through studying books in great depth, children develop a nuanced understanding of theme and narrative structures. We are very particular about the books we choose for Novel Study and class reads and ensure there is a wide and diverse range of protagonists, plot types, genres, settings and authors for our children to experience.
In practice, we focus on one novel or text for an extended period of time, allowing considerable in-depth analysis. Every child has a copy of the text to explore and learning takes place through immersion, collaboration, dramatic retelling and expert reading. There is an explicit focus on language analysis and authorial intent, especially sentence and word level choices (tier two vocabulary). Drama strategies such as hot-seating and freeze-framing are integrated into classroom practice.
Grammar, punctuation and spelling
Dedicated grammar, punctuation and spelling lessons are taught separately from the Novel Study curriculum. These weekly lessons ensure children embed this knowledge and practise using grammatical features and spelling rules in isolation, before applying their skills in written work across the curriculum. Weekly handwriting practise develops consistency in letter formation and cursive writing.