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Phonics and Reading

Children's Christmas book List 2023

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.” – Dr Seuss

At Sandilands we believe that reading is the key to accessing our whole curriculum and is the biggest indicator to future academic success. With reading at the forefront of our curriculum, we aim to establish each child as a lifetime reader and develop their love of reading. Please see our core reading and reading for pleasure overviews to view the texts that we use.

Phonics has been given a high priority within our school and we aim to ensure that all children are fluent readers. All of our teaching staff have received ‘Little Wandle’ training to ensure consistency across the school.

Little Wandle

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum and prepares our children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.


Teaching phonics
Phonics teaching starts from day 1 in Reception where we teach children how to recognise the sounds that letters make using fun pnuemonics or phrases. We usually teach four new sounds a week and have a review lesson on a Friday. In each lesson children are shown how to blend the sounds they know together to read words and then sentences. Children are assessed every six weeks to ensure they are making progress. Anyone who needs extra support will have daily sessions planned for them.


Reading Practise Sessions.
We have reading practise sessions three times a week, each session focuses on a different aspect of reading; Decoding, Prosody, which is reading with expression, using our storyteller voices and comprehension, answering questions about the story. We read the book three times as we want to develop our fluency in reading, Children then have access to the same book using our online library which they can share with you at home.

Helping at Home
The most important thing that you can do is read with your child!
Read to them, have them read to you, look at pictures, words and talk about the story. This all helps to develop your child’s listening skills, vocabulary and understanding of words, sentences and books.
Alongside their online reading book, children will also bring home a ‘Snuggle’ book each week, simply to enjoy sharing at home. This is how we are encouraging our children to develop a love of reading so please take the time to share this with them as often as you can

Shared reading in KS2

To reach the higher standards at the end of Key Stage Two in reading, researched has shown that an effective method for teaching children to learn how to comprehend texts is ‘Shared reading’. We believed that this strategy is beneficial to our children. We use this is conjunction with the One Education ‘Reading Gems’  These are a child-friendly way of introducing children to the different National Curriculum content domains used at the end of Key Stage 2 testing. Teachers use the content domains and question stems to plan engaging sessions that allow children to develop both their reading fluency and their comprehension skills.

At Sandilands, Shared Reading is taught in Year 3-Year 6 for 30-45 minutes daily and from Spring term in Year 2. This gives children the opportunity to develop a passion and enthusiasm for books alongside developing the skills required to master all of the content domains in the National Curriculum. Our shared reading texts have been carefully chosen to ensure children receive a breadth of reading books which are age-appropriate, challenging, engaging, high-quality and, ideally, include diverse characters from a range of cultures, backgrounds, abilities and family circumstances. Shared reading texts are reviewed and adapted each year to incorporate new texts, differing cohort needs and teacher preferences. Each class has a class novel or book which will be read by the class teacher throughout the week. The teacher will model read this aloud to the class while allowing time for questioning and discussions. These carefully selected books ensure that all our children are exposed to a wide range of quality literature and that they develop an awareness of famous authors and different writing styles.

Phonics Screening Check Support

Please Click here for the Parents Meeting Power Point

Please Click here for example assessments

Please Click here for example assessments

Please Click here for example assessments

Please Click here for example assessments

Please Click here for example assessments

Please Click here for guidance

Click below to see our Reading for Pleasure Spine! 

Book Fair Catalogue and payment

Online Catalogue 

Pre-payment for books

Little Wandle parent support

Little Wandle programme progression: Reception and Year 1 overviews - click here

Parent guide for accessing Big Cat Collins books at home

Click here for the Little Wandle Glossary. 

Little Wandle Reception and Year 1 Programme overview - click here to download

Pronunciation and letter formation parent support - Autumn 1 

Pronunciation and letter formation parent support - Autumn 2

Follow this link to the Little Wandle website for 'How to' videos for supporting at home. 

Click here for our Spring and Summer 2023 Shared Reading overview.