The ability to read is within the reach of every child.  The most direct route to reading for the vast majority of children is through systematically taught, 'synthetic phonics'.  At St. Peter's we follow a 'phonics first' approach to reading, where children learn to decode (read) and encode (spell) printed words quickly and fluently by blending and segmenting letter sounds. Our teaching and learning follows the progression of 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised'.

Our work supporting children with reading continues throughout their time at St Peter's.  We develop your child's reading across all areas of the curriculum as well as specific focused work through guided reading sessions, reading comprehension lessons, specific interventions and whole-class reading. 

These show the progression of GPCs (grapheme–phoneme correspondence, the sound–letter relationship between each element of the alphabetic code) and tricky words that we teach term-by-term. The progression has been organised so that children are taught from the simple to more complex GPCs, as well as taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words. All the graphemes taught are practised in words, sentences, and later on, in fully decodable books. Children review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long term memory. Children need to learn to read as quickly as reasonably possible, so they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to the treasure house of reading. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable with good pace, practice and participation by all children. Children who are not keeping-up with their peers will be given additional practice through keep-up sessions.

Phonics Workshop

We held a workshop for parents and carers to introduce our new scheme and to inform you of how we teach reading in school and how you could help at home. 

The link to the parents' section of the Little Wandle website can be found by clicking here.

Supporting your child's reading at home

Please find below further resources you can use to help support reading at home with your child.  The icons that can be found in your children's reading record are used to support the development of reading skills across the curriculum.  Please find these icons below as well as a helpful guide for parents.