On Tuesday 3rd October, we held our annual phonics workshop for parents. This session is an opportunity to hear about how our school teaches phonics and reading to our young pupils. Phonics is vital for all pupils as it supports them with their reading and writing. Our Literacy specialist, Mrs Ambrose, lead the session with Mrs Saxby in support.
Our phonics approach teaches children to decode words by sounds, rather than recognising whole words. The emphasis in early years teaching is on synthetic phonics, in which words are broken up into the smallest units of sound (phonemes). Children are taught the letters (graphemes) that represent these phonemes and also learn to blend them into words.
At Grange Infants School, we use Little Wandle as our SSP. Our children have 5 phonics sessions a day and if some children require it, there are 1:1 or small group catch up sessions for them. These sessions are followed by group reading where the children will have 3 sessions a week based on decoding, prosody and comprehension. The books will then come home once they have read them at least 3 times. Home reading should all be about practicing reading and making sure they are fluent at the books. We do ask that parents read with their children at least 4 times a week to support this. The more they read, the better at reading they will become!
After our phonics workshops, parents were able to then join their children in the classroom either in a phonics teaching session to see our teachers and children in action, or in a reading session. Both year 1 and Reception children took part in a phonics session with their parents and Year 2, a blended approach with some phonics and group reading.
We would like to say how lovely it was to see so many parents in attendance. I know the children and the teachers certainly loved seeing you all in school and joining in.
For more information about how you can help at home, or to watch any of the videos from Little Wandle, please visit our website: https://grange-inf.swindon.sch.uk/learning-education/learning-resources/phonics-and-reading
Or the Little Wandle website for parents: For parents | Letters and Sounds (littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk)
