The Teaching of Phonics

At St Mary’s, phonics is taught through a whole-class approach, ensuring that every child benefits from high-quality first teaching delivered by their class teacher. We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics scheme, which aligns with our commitment to developing strong communication and language skills from the earliest stages.

Our phonics teaching supports children in recognising sounds, blending these sounds to read words, and gradually stringing words together to read simple sentences confidently. This approach is integral to our curriculum’s ambition to develop fluent, confident, and enthusiastic readers.

Each phonics lesson at St Mary’s follows a consistent sequence of activities to reinforce learning and build skills:

• Review of previously taught Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) (around 10 minutes)
• Teaching, practising, and applying new GPCs (around 15 minutes)

In addition to whole-class phonics sessions, we provide targeted small group and one-to-one interventions throughout the day. These sessions address any misconceptions and help consolidate previous learning, ensuring all children make strong progress in their reading journey.

This structured and supportive approach reflects our vision that every child at St Mary’s will flourish and experience ‘life in all its fullness’ through the gift of reading.

Reading Practice Sessions

At St Mary’s, we believe it is essential that children do more than simply recognise letter-to-grapheme correspondences—they must apply this knowledge to the skill of reading itself. To support this, every child takes part in adult-led reading practice sessions three times a week, using books carefully matched to their current reading level.

In these sessions, children read the same book aloud three times, developing increasing automaticity and accuracy with each read. Our ‘three read’ model ensures each session has a clear focus:

• Read 1: Decoding – applying phonics knowledge to read words accurately
• Read 2: Prosody – reading with meaning, expression, stress, and intonation
• Read 3: Comprehension – understanding the text and its meaning

Following these sessions, children take the book home to share with their parents and carers for one week before exchanging it for their next reading practice book. This approach supports fluency, confidence, and a love of reading, all key to our vision of enabling children to ‘live life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10).

Children bring home two types of reading books:

• Reading Practice Book: The book used during their reading practice sessions, which children should be able to read fluently and independently.
• Sharing Book: A book chosen from our school library for parents and children to enjoy together. These books may be beyond the child’s independent reading level and are intended to foster a love of stories and language through shared reading.

This balanced reading approach ensures children at St Mary’s develop strong decoding skills alongside a rich vocabulary and comprehension, supporting their overall progress in reading and lifelong learning.

Resources for Parents