EYFS READING & PHONICS

Reading and Phonics in the EYFS 

At St Michael’s we know that the teaching of phonics is an important step towards a lifelong love of reading, helping children to develop proficient literacy skills. In the Early Years we ensure that children are exposed to and engaged with a wide variety of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems. Through conversation, story telling and role play. Children are able to share their ideas with appropriate modelling, support and questioning which enables them to become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language structures.

As they move into Reception they are exposed to phonics teaching, which involves teaching children the sounds of letters (not the letter names) and how these sounds can be blended together to make words. E.g. the word ‘mop’ is a decodable word because the letter sounds can be blended together.

m– o – p→ mop

At St Michael's CE Primary School we use a validated systematic synthetic phonics scheme (SSP) to teach phonics and reading called 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised'.

Phonics is taught daily in class through:

• Revisit and Review - reinforcing four recently learned GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondence)

• Teach and Practise - new phoneme, GPC, oral blending, independent reading and trickly words

• Practise and Apply - reading sentences and spelling

Reading is taught 3 times a week to small groups with different focuses:

• Session 1: Decoding (ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound relationships)

• Session 2: Prosody (expressive reading)

• Session 3: Comprehension (understanding the text)

Parent documents and support about the 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised' scheme can be found on the following link to help give further information about the scheme and how you can help your children at home: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised