Grapheme Chart for Year 1: Phases 2, 3 and 5 (Big Cat Phonics for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised)

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We support this further from year 2 and in Key Stage 2 with our spellings programme and weekly SPAG lessons in Year 3 upwards. We continue to support children with ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ through Key Stage 2 where needed. We hope that your child will be familiar with the following words and it may be useful to discuss them at home when you are helping them with their reading.

The teaching of Phonics involves introducing the children to the correct terminology to help build their skills and work more independently with their reading. A colour book-banded reading book which is fully decodable. Children should be able to sound out any words that they are unsure of, enabling them to build further confidence when reading. This continues our practice of children taking home a physical book, matched to their reading level. Practise– using the sound in words – Spotting the new phoneme in words, modelling blending and then allowing the children to read words with the new sound from flashcards? Match the picture. Select pictures from magazine or online and practise oral blending i.e. a picture of a beach, the child will need to orally sound out ‘ b-ea-ch’. You can also show some pictures and then cards showing words to match the picture and the child has to match the word with the correct picture once they have sounded it out and blended.

It is really important that the sounds are said clearly and without any other sound attached. When sounds are not said correctly, it can confuse children and they can sometimes struggle to put the sounds together to make the word. Write down some words get children to read and then cut up words into graphemes or use the flashcards (e.g. snail would be cut up into 's-n-ai-l' to include digraph. Then get children to reassemble word correctly. They may then like to think of rhyming words and have a go at spelling these. This could lead to a discussion about how different graphemes can represent the same sound (e.g. a_e in whale). We would encourage you to support your child’s reading journey by listening to them read at home as often as possible. As they learn different spellings they ‘grow the code’ and learn to use grapheme charts to help them choose the right spelling. These will be used later in the year.

A lot of things will remain the same. The children are already having daily phonics sessions. Reception will continue with this session but Year 1 will now have 2 sessions per day. Segmenting –identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and being able to write down the letters for each sound i.e. him h-i-m. Bingo. Children should divide paper into 6 sections and write a grapheme in each. You may then choose flashcards (either home-made or printed) for the children to cross off their board. Give bonus point if they can say the sound before you do. The same game can be adapted to play with real or nonsense words.

We teach with each book three times and through this repeated reading children are taught to read with expression and understanding. This means that the books we use need to be of the best quality. They need to be fully decodable and matched to our progression, but they need to connect with our children too. If we want our children to see reading as something that is worth putting all that hard work into, then we need to make learning to read worth it. Books should be mirrors of our lives and doors that open into the world, even the very first books we teach children to read with. If we make learning to read a pleasure and children feel that reading has purpose then we are fostering readers for life. For more information about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, book your free spot for their first briefing of the new school year on 2nd September 2021 at 3.45pm. We want children to become lifelong readers, therefore it is essential that they are encouraged to read for pleasure. The desire of wanting to read will help with the skill of reading. To help foster a love of reading, children should take a book home that they can share and enjoy with their parent/carer. Involving the children in the choice of this book is important. These books offer a wealth of opportunities for talking about the pictures and enjoying the story. We want to offer a variety of books, including non-fiction, so they can enjoy a range of writing. Parents/carers need to understand that they should not expect their child to read this book independently and certainly should not try to get their child to do so. The book is for the parent/carer to read to or with the child. Again, it is good to talk about the book with the child, but important not to turn the discussion into a test. The goal is enjoyment.