Phonics and Reading at Greetland

Teaching

At Greetland we use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme. This programme is followed with rigor and fidelity by all teachers and teaching assistants. Discrete whole-class phonics lessons are taught to all children, daily in Reception and Year 1. To ensure that learning is embedded, flashcards and reading opportunities continue throughout the day and additional phonics teaching is given to identified children. Phonics remains the main strategy that we use to approach/decode unfamiliar words and spelling across the school. We never use our children as an excuse and believe we can teach all children to read.

Reading

As soon as children become proficient, independent blenders, they can take a reading book home. Before books are taken home, children read their reading book in school with an adult three times a week. Reading books are selected by the class teacher to match the sounds that children know or need to work on. This way the books become a focused tool to support progress.

Assessment

Individual phonics assessments are completed for all children in Reception and Year 1 every half term. Teachers then use this information to support pupils in moving forwards. Continuous formative assessment is carried out during lessons and this is used to inform any same day intervention or catch up.

Intervention

Children who have been identified as “at risk of falling behind” receive daily intervention until they are back on track. We continue to use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised interventions, no additional packages are used.

Writing Purpose Overview

Impact

At The Greetland Academy we use comparative judgement to assess writing across the school. As a research school we ensure that research is at the heart of everything that we do and this process has been shown to be as reliable as double marking writing whilst also being much quicker. Comparative judgement is a process where judges compare two responses and decide which is better. Following repeated comparisons, the resulting data is statistically modelled and responses placed on a scale of relative quality. The results from the process are used to support our own teacher judgements.

Writing Manifesto

Our school has contributed to and adopted the Elland Cluster Manifesto for writing that outlines the prerequisites of successful writing and the practices which enable pupils to become fluent, well-accomplished writers. Please find a copy of the most recent draft of the manifesto here.

Supporting at Home

The Little Wandle website has lots of videos and information to support each stage of reading. Click here.

The resources on the website will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how we teach these sounds at school and to help you feel confident about supporting your child reading at home.

Reception and Year 1 also share weekly phonics review videos on Seesaw.