Little Wandle Phonics

Phonics is taught at St Faith’s Church of England Infant and Nursery School through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. The Little Wandle programme overview is seen below and shows the progression of GPCs and tricky words that are taught 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. To achieve these expectations of progression, we ensure to maintain pace, practice and participation by all children.

When the children reach Year 2, their phonics and spelling is supplemented with the ‘No Nonsense Spelling’ scheme.