Little Wandle
Prestfelde is now in its third year of using the Little Wandle programme, to teach phonics & early reading!
Little Wandle is a well researched and pedagogically sound scheme, written by expert teachers and has been overseen and validated by the DFE. We spent a long time researching different programmes and deciding which was best for our pupils.
All teachers and teaching assistants in Little Prestfelde are fully trained and able to teach and deliver phonics lessons, reading practice sessions and Keep Up interventions for those who need it.
Reading practice takes place three times a week and we focus on decoding, prosody and comprehension. Matched exactly to each child's phonic ability, the high quality Little Wandle books offer engaging text, ensuring that children become fluent, competent readers.
Phonics lessons take place every day in Reception and Year One. This continues into Year 2 and then children transition to focusing on phonics for spelling. Children in Nursery enjoy Little Wandle Foundations for Phonics where they are learning how to tune into sounds, develop early language skills, learn songs and nursery rhymes, and listen to lots of stories.
To motivate and inspire our children further, we have regular author visits where children get to take part in workshops, learn what it’s like to be an author or illustrator, and have the opportunity to have books signed. Our most recent visits have been from award winning Simon James Green, local author Ruth Quayle, and author/illustrator Matty Long whose Super Happy Magic Forest series is currently being made into TV series with BBC and Rai Kids.
A love of books
Alongside learning how to read, we hugely value the importance of developing a love of books and reading, in all our pupils. Each classroom is filled with high quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry books, and we have our wonderful ‘Little Friends’ library within Little Prestfelde. Each class visits the library weekly to spend time reading and for children to choose a book to borrow. In addition to that, the library is also open two to three evenings a week after school, for parents to visit with their children. We already have over 1000 books in our library, and we are always adding new releases, popular favourites and books that we know our pupils will love. We try to respond to all the requests that we get for specific books!
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