Intent

At Winterbourne Earls Primary School, we are committed to instilling a passion and enthusiasm for reading in every child. It is our intent that with this at the heart of our values, we can provide each child with the opportunity to explore the world around them and widen their curiosity, creative thinking and imagination through reading. To achieve this, we will provide children with the phonic skills to decode and blend words, enabling them to access a range of texts. We want our children to leave Winterbourne Earls as confident, fluent readers who take pleasure in reading. It is our belief that Phonics provides the foundations for both reading and writing, enabling them to become the confident, passionate readers and writers that we want them to be.

Implementation

At Winterbourne Earls, we use Little Wandle for Letters and Sounds as our phonics programme. This is a new scheme for the school and will be implemented from September 2023. We are very excited to be starting our Little Wandle journey and look forward to seeing our children thrive under this new scheme. Children in Reception and Year 1 receive daily phonics lessons lasting 20-30 minutes each. These are followed by a review session on a Friday. The children also receive 3 x weekly reading sessions with a trained member of staff using a decodable book matched to their secure phonics knowledge. During these sessions, the children work on their fluency, prosody and comprehension skills.