Early Reading

 Introducing Little Wandle  

At Euxton St Mary’s we are committed to the delivery of excellence in the teaching of Phonics. We are passionate about ensuring all children become confident readers. Phonics is a key skill that supports the development of early reading skills and our mission is to teach every child to read and instil a love of reading in every child. We have just adopted a brand new systematic synthetic phonics scheme called Little Wandle ( Letters and Sounds Revised). This programmed is designed to help our children master the skills of reading and spelling in their early school years.  

Phonics in EYFS and Key Stage 1 

The programme begins in EYFS and guides the children through the early stages of sound discrimination, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and oral blending and segmenting. Once the children are ready, they move on to letter recognition, learning and practising the skills needed to blend graphemes for reading and segment for spelling. As the scheme progresses, there is also an emphasis on reading and spelling ‘tricky’ words and polysyllabic words. 

EYFS Overview 

Year 1 Overview 

Reading Practice Sessions 

We ensure that all children have regular opportunities to apply the phonics they have learned to reading fully decodable books. These regular reading practice sessions will take place two times per week.  

Each reading session has a clear focus, so the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions focus on decoding, prosody and comprehension.  

We have a comprehensive reading scheme in school that runs alongside the teaching of phonics. The Big Cat Phonics books ( matched to Little Wandle) offer a chance for children to practise their decoding skills regularly throughout a series of fun, exciting and phonetically decodable books.  

Home Reading  

At Euxton St Mary’s , we value the role that parents play in supporting their children to become fluent, confident readers. We believe that creating relationships between home and school to support your child’s reading is crucial. 

The children will bring home two books per week. One book will be their reading practice book which is the book that your child has already read in school during their reading practice sessions. This book is matched to their phonic stage and will be fully decodable. Therefore, they should be able to read this book confidently with 95% fluency without any help from an adult. Parents role here is to listen with interest and encourage and praise their child’s reading achievement. 

The second book your child will bring home is a shared reading book to encourage reading for pleasure. In order to encourage children to foster a love of reading, we ask children to choose a book from our infant library to share with parents at home. They may not be able to read this book independently, however, the goal is to enjoy sharing this book with you. 

Helping your child to develop comprehension

In EYFS and KS1 we use VIPERS to ask children questions to develop their reading comprehension. 

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 key reading domains.

VIPERS stands for

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.  As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that we ask, and children are familiar with, a range of questions. In EYFS and KS1 we have our Super Six stories for each half term ( 1 story per week of term) and we ensure that the children are accessing a wide range of texts. We use VIPERS when we read our Super Six Story of the week to develop the children's comprehension skills.  

Parent Information 

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