At St. John's, we believe that reading is the key to success and underpins children's access to the curriculum; it clearly impacts on their achievement. To be able to read, children need to be taught an efficient strategy to decode words. That strategy is phonics.   We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Year R and Year 1. It is vitally important that children review and revisit Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children's long term memory.  Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills.   

Systematic synthetic phonics are taught using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. Children are introduced to synthetic phonics at the start of their Reception year and children progress through the scheme to the end of Year One. We strive to ensure that children “keep up” rather than “catch up” and we offer early intervention when a pupil is making slower progress than expected.

We follow the Little Wandle scheme for reading and ensure that each child is given a reading book with the relevant sounds that they are learning at that time. The books are varied in their genres which encourages a love of different texts. Children read in a group three times a week, using the same text, following a process of decoding, prosody and comprehension. Following the comprehension session, children will take the book home. At this point, it is expected that they will be reading the book at 90% accuracy and with a high level of fluency.

The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. 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. 

Useful Documents