Little Wandle Phonics Program

The Little Wandle scheme is a complete Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) program designed to teach children to read and spell. It's based on the original government-recommended Letters and Sounds but has been fully revised and updated to ensure it's a rigorous, fast-paced, and highly effective program, meeting all the Department for Education's validation criteria.

The scheme provides a detailed progression for teaching phonemes, graphemes, and tricky words, starting in Phase 1 and continuing through to Phase 5, with resources and support. It includes lesson plans, resources like flashcards and decodable books, and aims to develop fluent, confident readers.

Little Wandle Phonics Stages

Phase 1 - Foundations for Phonics

This pre-phonics stage, focuses on oral development. Children develop strong listening and attention skills, learning to:

• Listen to and distinguish different sounds (environmental, instrumental, body sounds).

• Develop an awareness of rhyme and alliteration.

• Practise oral blending (hearing separate sounds and putting them together to make a word, e.g., /c/ /a/ /t/ cat). This is crucial preparation for reading.

Phase 2

This is where formal phonics teaching begins. Children learn the first 19 most common single-letter sounds (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences or GPCs), and a few initial "tricky words" (words that cannot be sounded out yet).

• Focus: Learning the sound a letter makes and how to write it.

• Skills: Blending (for reading) and segmenting (for spelling) CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words like cat, dog, pin.

• Example Sounds: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, e, u, r, h, b, f, l.

Phase 3

The pace increases as children learn digraphs (two letters that make one sound) and trigraphs (three letters that make one sound).

• Focus: Mastering the remaining single-letter GPCs and common digraphs.

• Example Digraphs/Trigraphs: ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, er.

• Skills: Reading and spelling longer CVC words and continuing to learn more tricky words.

Phase 4

This is a phase of consolidation and expansion, not introducing new sounds.

• Focus: Blending and segmenting words with adjacent consonants, often called consonant clusters.

• Example Word Structures:

  • CCVC (consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant): trap, swim, flat.

  • CVCC (consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant): tent, milk, band.

• Skills: Building fluency and speed in reading longer words that only use previously taught GPCs.

Phase 5

This is the final main phase, where the alphabetic code is completed.

• Focus: Learning alternative spellings for sounds they already know, and new GPCs for different sounds.

• Example: Learning that the /ai/ sound in rain can also be spelled ay (as in play) and a-e (as in cake).

• Skills: Reading increasingly complex words and becoming fully fluent.

Beyond

Children who have successfully completed Phase 5 move on to the Little Wandle Spelling Programme. This focuses on:

• Reviewing Phase 5.

• Introducing the Bridge to Spelling, which teaches core spelling concepts, including morphology (word structure) and etymology (word history).

• Teaching statutory National Curriculum spelling rules and patterns.