Phonics and Early Reading – Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised

At South View Infant and Nursery School, we use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme.
This is a complete phonics scheme validated by the Department for Education, designed to ensure that all children learn to read with confidence and accuracy.

Plans to purchase the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme were in place from Spring 2024 and it was implemented in September 2024.

What is phonics?

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read by matching the sounds they hear in spoken words (phonemes) to the letters and groups of letters that represent them (graphemes). Once children can blend these sounds together, they can read unfamiliar words and begin to develop fluency and comprehension.

How we teach phonics

• Two phonics sessions each day: Every child in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 has two daily phonics sessions.
  • The morning core session follows the progressive structure of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, introducing new grapheme-phoneme correspondences and practising blending and segmenting skills.
  • The afternoon keep-up session is specifically tailored to each child’s needs. It focuses on closing gaps in understanding, developing automaticity in word reading, and improving fluency and confidence.
• Reading practice sessions:
  Children also take part in small-group reading sessions three times a week, using fully decodable books matched precisely to their phonics knowledge. Each session has a different focus — decoding, prosody (reading with expression) and comprehension.

• Home reading:
  The same book is then allocated to each child through Collins Hub ebooks so children can have access to their reading book at home or on the move to practise success with a familiar text, helping to build confidence and fluency.

Assessment and progression

Children’s phonics knowledge that they learn in the core session is assessed every six week to ensure teaching is matched closely to their next steps. Children’s phonics knowledge that they learn in their keep up session is assessed every three weeks to ensure that gaps are being closed and that progress is maximised.
Any child who does not meet the expected standard in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check continues with Little Wandle support in Year 2 until they are secure and confident.

Phonics progression in Year 2: In Year 2, those children who passed the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1 take part in a five week phonics review programme to ensure that the knowledge has been retained over the summer break. Children who demonstrate a secure and competent knowledge of Little Wandle review programme will then move off of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised and move onto Little Wandle Spelling for the remainder of Year 2. This programme includes a daily core session and keep up session similar to the format and style of the phonics programme.

Reading progression in Year 2: Those children in Year 2 who passed the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check in Year 1, are assessed using Little Wandle reading assessments. The simple one-minute assessments are used to measure the fluency of children in the final stages of Phase 5. Research identifies the key factors of fluency to be: accuracy, rate/automaticity, prosody/expression (pauses, intonation). These passages can be used to work out the accuracy and rate of a child’s reading. If the child is reading accurately with a high level of automaticity with suitable prosy and expression then they will be assessed to define which book banded level is suitable for the child at that time.

Supporting reading at home

We encourage parents and carers to play an active role in supporting their child’s reading journey.
The Little Wandle website offers short videos and guides to show how to pronounce sounds correctly, blend words and support early reading at home.

👉 Little Wandle For Parents

Reading for pleasure

Reading Rewards

Every child visits our fantastic school library every week to read books and select a book to take home. We always encourage all readers to share a book at home with their grown-ups and have in school challenges to support reading. We believe that reading aloud is invaluable to not only develop reading skills, but also supports a lifelong love of talking and listening, turn taking, social communication as well as supporting reading itself.

Many exciting and rewarding activities are arranged in school to promote the pleasure and knowledge that can be gained from books such as:

• Taking part in World Book Day
• Regular School Library Service (SLS) exchanges
• Using SLS at home
• Travelling Book Fair
• Visiting Authors
• New books for class libraries (e.g. graphic novels and visiting author texts)
• Reading ambassadors working with our school librarian

Our aim

Through high-quality phonics teaching, consistent practice and regular support, we aim for all children to become fluent, confident readers who develop a lifelong love of books and reading.