How to Help your Child with Phonics

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write. At Southville Primary School, we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised 2021: Programme progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

For information on how to support your child with phonics, please visit the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised website. The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. You will find a grapheme information sheet to help you with formation and pronunciation. It is really important that you pronounce the sounds correctly at home if you are supporting your child. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home. If you are unsure, please ask your child’s teacher.

Supporting your child with reading at home

Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home. There will be three types of reading book that your child will now bring home:

1. A reading practice book

As usual, we will continue to change an actual, physical book every week.

2. An online reading practice book 

This book will be an electronic copy of the same book shared in the classroom sessions.

Both of these books are fully decodable have been carefully matched to your child’s current reading level. When listening to your child read the book please remember to give them lots of praise – celebrate their success and where necessary their  perseverance! 

Tips:

• If they can’t read a word, allow them time to use their sounds to build it up, where necessary help them to build the word or read it to them. 
• Re-read sentences with the children to develop rhythm and intonation.
• After they have finished, talk about the book together.

3. A sharing book

In order to encourage your child to become a lifelong reader, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. The sharing book is a book they have chosen for you to enjoy together.

Please remember that you shouldn’t expect your child to read this alone. Read it to or with them. Discuss the pictures, enjoy the story, predict what might happen next, use different voices for the characters, explore the facts in a nonfiction book. The main thing is that you have fun! 

Reading Records

We will continue to use the Reading Records to note your child’s assigned books.  It is important to us that the record is easy for families to complete so please leave a short comment in the record to let us know your child has read the books. We are always interested to hear how they got on. 

We look forward to catching up with you about your child’s reading progress in our parent’s evenings. Please do not hesitate to talk to the teachers if you have any questions about your child’s reading in the meantime.

Useful links for parents/ carers:

• A Guide to Phonics
• Phonics and Early Reading Parent Workshop and Q&A
• Parent and carers guide to pronouncing phonemes
• Parent and carers guide to Tricky Words

Home Learning:

Follow the link to find the Letters and Sounds for Home and School channel. This resource is designed by experts for use at home with children who are unable to attend school.

Fun games and videos for children:

• Phonics Bloom
• Phonics Play
• Geraldine the Giraffe on YouTube
• Alphablocks on BBC