St Luke's is a Little Wandle Champion School

We are excited to share that we are a Little Wandle Champion School! This means that our school has met 16 Standards of Excellence in the teaching of early reading and phonics. Other schools come to see Little Wandle in action at our school and share the wonderful work our staff and children are doing. We are very proud to be part of this fantastic network of Champion Schools across the country!

Little Wandle Live Events

We host live events for Little Wandle Schools. These half day events, including breakfast or lunch are a brilliant opportunity for Little Wandle members to see best practice in action, reflect on practice and work on action for improvement. For further information about Live Events at our school visit  Link to Little Wandle Live Event Information for Little Wandle Schools

Phonics at St Luke's

At St. Luke'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. Phonic decoding skills must be practised until children become automatic and fluent reading is established. 

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) and it is the programme that we adopt at St Luke's. 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 Correspondences (GPCs) 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. 

Children need to learn to read as quickly and reasonably as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to the treasure house of reading. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable; children who are not keeping up with their peers are given additional practice immediately through keep-up sessions.

On-going assessment of children's progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are fully decodable and matched to children's secure phonics knowledge. As well as fully decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using fully phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading.

Please see link below for our Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme progression for Reception and Year One.