English is learning to read, write, speak and listen

We chose Little Wandle Revised phonics scheme because it closely follows Letters and Sounds documents and we work closely with the Childer Thornton English Hub and Little Wandle Trust (as we have done so over the past three years). All staff have received training for this approach. There are clear assessments and interventions that allows teachers to support children to ‘keep up’ with the learning instead of catching up. We follow Little Wandle Revised phonics scheme with total fidelity.

At Mendell Primary, phonics sessions take place every day for at least 20 minutes following the Little Wandle Revised scheme. All staff have been trained. In order to address each child’s different needs, teachers assess each child’s phonic and reading progress regularly. This allows us to quickly identify children needing additional support both during lessons and through additional intervention. During whole class phonics sessions, each class has an additional adult with them during the lesson to assist in assessing and teaching. On the same day, teachers deliver intervention to these children to address gaps.

In Key Stage 1, all children are tested on their basic knowledge of phonics. Children will continue to work on elements of phonics until they are fully proficient throughout Key Stage 2. In key stage 2, we also follow the 'Babcock' spelling scheme to teach spelling strategies.

At Mendell, all our early reading books are phonetically decodable and matched closely to sounds that are being taught in school. This gives children as much opportunity as possible to practice fluency. Currently, we use ‘Collins Big Cats’ as well as the whole school online reading scheme ‘Bug Club’ by Pearson. Children also have the opportunity to visit our school library to borrow a reading for pleasure book and have a timetabled session to visit the school book swap to take a book home to read for pleasure.

From Year 2 to Year 6 we follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities 

for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided.  

We deliver one whole class shared reading lesson per week from years 2-6 with bespoke grouped reading for every pupil at least once a week as well as individual reading. For pupils still needing support with phonics from years 2-6, we provide an individual reading programme that has phonically decodable texts at the heart of it. In our shared and grouped reads, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.

Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.  

You will find the end of year expectations for reading for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.

If you follow both P2R and P2W, you may wish to add the following statement:

We also use Pathways to Write to drive our writing curriculum. This aligns with Pathways to Read ensuring meaningful links for our pupils with texts and topics that are used across Literacy, Humanities and Science.

Some photographs of Year 6 reading to Foundation Stage children on World Book Day