Our Lady Of The Rosary Catholic Primary School

"A beacon of love, joy, calmness and hope."

Reading

By the end of Key Stage 2, we want children at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Primary School to be confident and fluent readers, who have developed a love for reading. By the time children leave our school, we expect them to communicate through speaking and listening, reading and writing, with confidence, fluency and understanding in a range of situations. 

At Our Lady's we promote a love of reading from the moment children start their learning journey with us. We do this by ensuring the children have access to high quality texts from EYFS up to Year 6, this includes both fiction and non fiction.

Each class throughout school adopts the 'Take One Book Approach' where a book is used as a theme throughout the teaching sequence from reading to writing. It is an opportunity to read, explore and write in a variety of genres using one text as a stimulus. Daily class reading sessions help to foster a love of reading and stories throughout the school.  

We want every child to take pleasure in reading across a range of genres and have a strong motivation to read for a variety of purposes. These are skills that will transfer to all other areas of the curriculum and are vital to ensure a child's academic success.

 

Phonics and Early Reading

The teaching of phonics at Our Lady’s Catholic Primary School follows the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Programme- this programme was introduced in September 2022.

We conduct discrete daily phonic lessons from Early Years based on the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised approach for teaching phonics. These lessons focus on repeated practise and lead to high quality phonic sessions being delivered by all staff.

  • In Nursery, children follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised ‘Foundations for Phonics’ guidance. The focus is on daily oral blending and language development through high quality stories and rhymes.
  • In Reception and Year 1, children follow the progression within Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. Phonics is taught daily and there is a review session on a Friday.
  • Phonics starts in Reception in week 2 to ensure the children make a strong start.
  • By the end of Reception, children will have been taught up to the end of phase 4.
  • By the end of Year 1, children will have been taught up to the end of phase 5.
  • Children in Year 2 recap any gaps in their phonics knowledge (Phase 5 review) in the Autumn term before moving on to the Bridge for Spelling Programme followed by the spelling units.

In Key Stage Two, any children who are not at age related expectations for reading or have not passed their Phonic screening check take part in the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Rapid Catch Up 7+ Programme. This is regularly assessed to allow children to make rapid progress with their phonics learning. Children accessing this programme in Key Stage Two will also use Little Wandle decodable books matched to their correct phonic phase. Once the children have graduated from the Rapid Catch up Programme they will then enter the Little Wandle Fluency Programme to help develop their fluency for reading.

Our systematic, synthetic Phonics programme, Little Wandle encourages children to read with fluency and confidence. Each week, the children access three group reading sessions at school with a focus on word decoding, prosody and comprehension before taking the book home to read. This book has been carefully matched to each child’s current reading level. Alongside this, children in EYFS and Key Stage 1 choose a 'sharing book' to take home from their class reading area.

We promote a strong home/ school partnership and encourage children across all year groups to read regularly and discuss books with an adult at home.

Please access the Little Wandle website (link below) to find more information. The ‘For parents’ section provides videos of how to pronounce sounds and how we teach the reading of words.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Reception and Year 1 Progression

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Please see the documents below detailing how our Little Wandle Programme fufils the content and approach of the EYFS Statutory Framework and the National Curriculum for English in Year 1.

Little Wandle and the EYFS Statutory Framework

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Little Wandle and the National Curriculum for English in Year 1

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