At Rednal Hill Infant School, we wholeheartedly believe that every child will learn to read and love to read. As an infant school, we follow Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, a systematic, synthetic phonics programme that provides children with strong foundations for early reading, fluency and comprehension. Teaching is precise, consistent and carefully sequenced from Nursery through to Year 2, ensuring that children build their knowledge of sounds, blending and decoding step by step.

Phonics is a vital part of helping children become confident, effective readers, but it sits within a wider, language-rich curriculum. Through Little Wandle, children are taught phonics in a structured and progressive way, beginning with Phase 2 sounds and building towards more complex phoneme-grapheme correspondences in Phase 5. Daily practice helps children secure their knowledge, apply it when reading words and sentences, and develop fluency over time. Alongside this, we nurture a love of books, stories and language so that children see reading as both a key skill and a source of enjoyment.

Home Readers

To support reading at home, children bring home a book that closely matches their phonic knowledge, enabling them to read with confidence and become the ‘expert’ when sharing their book with others. Our home reading books are organised into phases with small, incremental steps, so that new sounds are introduced and practised in manageable chunks. Once children can read these sounds confidently, they move on to the next set. Bookmarks are used to help families and children understand the targets they are working towards. Children are encouraged to reread their home reader several times to build fluency, accuracy and expression when reading sentences. Children in EYFS and Year 1 also choose a book from the story library to share with a grown-up at home.

We hold reading workshops for parents and carers to support reading at home and to share practical guidance on how children learn to read. These sessions help families feel confident when supporting phonics, blending, fluency and enjoyment, ensuring every child has the best opportunity to become the very best reader they can be.

Reading for Pleasure

 

Reading for Pleasure

Another important part of developing a love of reading is giving children regular opportunities to listen to high-quality stories being read aloud. In each class, children help choose from a selection of books for their class story. Time is set aside every day for an adult to read to the children, allowing them to enjoy stories, develop their vocabulary and hear excellent models of expressive storytelling.

Spine Texts in Every Class

In order to develop patterns of stories and to be exposed to a range of texts, each class has 10 stories that they will have read to them regularly over the year, promoting a deep level of comprehension of the texts. Children are exposed to a rich variety of texts, both fiction and non-fiction throughout their journey from Nursery to Year 2. These are currently the texts we are enjoying:

                 

    

 

 

Our Reading library

Reading with your child

Please use the link below to access videos from Little Wandle explaining how your child learning how to blend and how they are taught different sounds (phonemes).

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/