Phonics

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Phonics at Birklands

Phonics and Early Reading

At Birklands, we believe that learning to read is one of the most important skills children will ever learn. It opens the door to a lifetime of enjoyment and success. To ensure every child becomes a confident, fluent reader, we teach early reading and phonics through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. This is a systematic, synthetic phonics scheme validated by the Department for Education.

Here is Birklands' Phonics Intent

How We Teach Phonics:

Daily Phonics Lessons: Children in EYFS and Key Stage One take part in short, focused lessons every day. Year 2 children start the year by recapping Phase 5 (content taught in Year 1) before moving on to spelling units.

Please click here to see our Reception overview. Please use resources sent home to support your child's learning.

Please click here to see our Year 1 overview. Please use Miss Lounds' videos which focuse on new learning, resources are also sent home to align with these videos.

Please click here to see our Year 2 overview.

Reading Practice Sessions: Children have small group reading sessions three times a week, using fully decodable books that match each child’s current phonics stage. These three sessions focus on decoding skills, prosody (expression) and comprehension.

Ongoing Assessment: Teachers regularly assess progress to ensure all children are 'keeping up'. Assessments are completed every half-term. Teachers provide additional support when needed through targeted ‘keep-up’ sessions and children who are taking part in keep up sessions are assessed more frequently to monitor progress.

Supporting Reading at Home
We encourage parents and carers to engage with their child’s phonics journey by sharing books each day. Please listen to your child read each day and record this in their reading diary.

Your child has a new reading for pleasure book each week (100 book before you leave EYFS/KS1). Please read this to your child and record in diaries.

Please watch any video links sent home (these are sent via text or Tapestry) and use the resources with your child.

Little Wandle provide helpful videos, resources and guidance on their parent web page. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask your child's class teacher.

For parents | Letters and Sounds

Please click here for videos about how to use flashcards at home and different games to play.