To love, to learn, to live... to leave a legacy
Reading at Smannell & Enham opens doors!
The cornerstones to success for any child is the ability to read, understand and make sense of the world around them and so much of this comes from the ability to read.
Reading opens doors for children into new worlds, offers a mirror into their own and gives windows into the lives of others. We believe that EVERY child should be a reader and it is in our gift to give them the opportunity to succeed from the very start.
Little Wandle
The DfE requires every school to have a robust scheme of teaching for phonics and reading. From a long list, we have chosen Little Wandle as the scheme we follow because we believe it gives the most systematic, thorough journey for children with their phonics, paired by the best, high quality texts in both fiction and non-fiction. It also offers a brilliant training programme so that you can be sure that every member of staff is well trained and delivers the programme with consistency.
All of the adults that support our younger children from years R – 2 are involved in the delivery of phonics and spelling so that children are taught in small groups with expert tuition.
In 2024-25, children in Year R will begin their phonics journey in just their 2nd week of school in September. This rapid start to the phonics programme ensures we can meet all the coverage required so that children master basic early skills of reading.
Reading books
We begin teaching phonics from week 2 of Year R all the way through to Year 1 when the programme concludes. Should a child join us mid-year, we can act quickly to assess them and place them correctly on the scheme so that they are not over-faced with new learning but have a balance of new and old revision whilst they settle in.
Each week, your child will have a ‘learn to read‘ book – one chosen by their teacher, from the Little Wandle scheme. They will read this book 3 times during the week in class so that they are very familiar with the language and pattern of the book. In addition, they will choose their own ‘love to read‘ book. This is a book that they’ve chosen for themselves, that may be outside their reading ability but is one they’re interested in. Please share this book with them as it’s this one that will help them love reading.
Resources to help at home
The resources below are all from Little Wandle and help you at home to understand how to say the ‘pure sound’ so that it’s easy for your child to blend sounds together. There’s also a handy guide to the ‘patter’ or phrase that we use to teach your child to write their capital letters. This is a key learning component for writing in the early years so we thought it would helpful for you to know how we introduce writing these tricky letters!
| Pronunciation guide
Year R – Autumn 1 |
Pronunciation guide
Year R – Autumn 2 |
Pronunciation guide
Phase 3 sounds |
| Pronunciation guide
Year 1 – phase 5 sounds |
How to write capital letters | All the sounds your child will learn & order they’ll learn them |