English
Phonics
Our Nursery pupils receive a daily 10 minute phonics session following the Little Wandle 'Foundations for Phonics' programme. Children focus on listening skills, segmenting and blending in preparation for reading letters and learning letter sounds within Phase 2 when they start school in reception.
Within Reception and Year 1, children access a focussed daily programme of phonics. Lessons are led by both teachers and teaching assistants. Children are generally grouped by year group, however children who require more targetted learning may be grouped to support their educational needs. We run a SEND phonics programme and a Rapid Catch-up programme if required. If there are any children who are identified as falling behind, these children receive additional catch-up or Keep-up sessions. Assessments are completed every 6 weeks to ensure we always have up to date information and are able to ensure children make rapid progress.
The aim of the Little Wandle programme is to run this until the end of year 1. If there are any pupils who still require phonics in Y2 or beyond, we ensure we have provision to do this so that children continue to access the support they need.
We use the DFE approved 'Little Wandle' Phonics scheme https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/ Little Wandle provides a complete, systematic synthetic phonics programme and uses high quality learning resources. To support our Little Wandle reading programme, we have six full sets of reading books to match the scheme, all of which are phonetically decodable. The children take home one phonetically decodable book along with a 'sharing book' for parents/carers to share with their children. All teachers and teaching assistants have now received the training for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds. You can find resources for parents to help you support you child here: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
Reading
Here at Woore, we consider ourselves to be a reading school. Early readers are supported through high quality phonics lessons which teach individual sounds, segmenting and blending. This is taught daily to embed the sounds, to ensure children have the foundations to become confident readers. As children enter KS2, there is an increased emphasis on reading comprehension skills. This is taught through the use of ‘VIPERS’ in guided reading sessions and discrete comprehension sessions. At Woore we use the book banding system that starts following the successful completion of the Little Wandle programme. This is where books are colour coded according to their difficulty. Books are phonetically decodable and include a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Reading for Pleasure
Throughout school, reading is promoted in exciting and engaging ways. Each classroom has a calm and inviting space for reading, where children can access a range of high quality, carefully curated reading books. We have recently added to our class libraries new, popular reading books which are displayed prominently within classrooms. Children also have access to a range of non-fiction books, through the Shropshire Library Service, which change each term in line with the topics covered. At the heart of our school, we also have a dedicated non-fiction library, which enables children to independently explore topics of their choice or support learning within class. We will shortly be training a team of children in their roles as librarians. All teachers share stories with their class. We believe, that listening to stories and poetry and having the chance to discuss them is vital to a child’s growing appreciation of literature in all its forms.
Writing
We believe every child is a writer. Children are given the opportunity to write across a wide range of contexts, both fiction and non-fiction. For younger children, this is part of their everyday continuous provision, where they have the chance to mark make, form letters, form sentences and enjoy the writing experience. As children move through the school, they have an increased opportunity to explore a wider range of genres, which are often linked to our topics, to embed cross-curricular writing. High quality texts and stimuli are used to engaging and stimulate children’s imagination within their writing process. Handwriting starts in the Early Years (print) and by the end of Year 2, children are expected to be writing using the cursive style and within KS2 there is an expectancy that children will maintain their handwriting, whilst writing at speed. Handwriting is taught daily via discrete lessons using 'Letterjoin' across the school.
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