Our first work which takes place in the teaching of reading is the teaching of Phonics. Our approach to phonics is to teach Systematic Synthetic Phonics (as required by the Department of Education) through the Little Wandle scheme. We teach phonics with the expectation that our pupils will be fluent readers having secured word recognition skills by the end of Key Stage 1 (Year 2).

This begins in Nursery with the teaching of Phase One phonics which centres around children being able to recognise sounds that they can hear which is a preparation for moving onto learning the relationship between letters and sounds.

In Reception the children will move onto Phase 2 during which children are taught different sounds each week. We then expect children to move in Key Stage 1 through the Phonic phases so that they will be able to move onto the Support for Spelling scheme at the end of Year 2 and throughout Key Stage 2.