Using Spelling Shed Alongside Little Wandle Letters and Sounds

Lots of schools who choose to use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds also choose Spelling Shed as their spelling programme. This is because they align well together. It is important to use a spelling scheme alongside your phonics programme, as phonics schemes are designed to meet the National Curriculum objectives for word reading and often miss spelling objectives, therefore we recommend schools begin using Spelling Shed alongside Little Wandle in Years 1 and 2.

All National Curriculum Objectives for spelling (Appendix 1) are explicitly taught through Spelling Shed’s programme.

What do you need to consider?

There are a variety of ways that GPCs can be taught. As shown below, you can see that Little Wandle Letters and Sounds teaches ‘nk’ as a digraph, whereas Spelling Shed teaches it as two graphemes because you can hear the two separate phonemes. There is no correct way or incorrect way, they are just different ways.

Image showing how Spelling Shed and Little Wandle Letters and Sounds teaches the GPCs 'nk' and 'al'. There are two dots under 'nk' and two dots under 'al' to show that Spelling Shed teaches each as two graphemes. Under Little Wandle Letters and Sounds, the 'nk' and 'al' have a line showing that they teach them as digraphs.

Below is Spelling Shed’s alphabetic code, which shows you how Spelling Shed teaches each GPC. You will need to compare this to Little Wandle’s alphabetic code, which is called your ‘Grow the Code’ chart.

Spelling Shed's Alphabetic Code Chart. Down the left side are phonemes and the chart shows which graphemes represent the phonemes.

View and download Spelling Shed’s full alphabetic code chart here.

You may notice these slight differences in the scheme. If the child/children are already secure in their phonics learning, then you do not need to tell them to change the way they are representing the GPC. You can tell them that it is another correct way.

For example, when looking at the slide below, you can explain that ‘al’ can also be grouped together as a phoneme.

Slide titled 'Sound Boxes and Syllables' showing how to break words into syllables using Elkonin boxes. The word 'emotional' is segmented into boxes and divided into four syllables. Additional examples include 'survival', 'arrival' and 'burial', each shown with Elkonin boxes and three syllable breaks. Speech bubbles explain that each syllable has a vowel sound and that digraphs and trigraphs represent one sound.

We recommend that GPCs are taught in phonics first and then in spelling. Revisiting the objective is not simply a recap but should build upon the initial learning in the phonics session.

Spelling Shed's Stage 1 Medium Term Plan. It is split into half terms. There are 36 steps or objectives split over the year and it shows the words included in each step/objective.

Below is the completed spiral medium term plan for Phonics Shed and Spelling Shed. This is free to download and may help you.

Phonics Shed and Spelling Shed medium term plan for Year 1.
It is split into each half term across the top and weeks of each half term down the side. It is split into phonics and spelling showing the objective and graphemes taught in phonics compared to the objective and words taught in spelling.

Example – digraph ‘ea’ representing the ‘e’ sound.

Phonics Shed objective- Chapter 4b Set 3 ‘ea’/e/, ‘ow’/oa/ ‘or’/ur and ‘ey’/ai/. HFW ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’

National Curriculum statutory requirement – Teach the digraph ea (/ɛ/)

You can see in the medium term plan for Year 1 that this digraph is taught in Spring 1 Week 3 and then revisited in a spelling session in Spring Week 6.

If you decide to move any of the weeks around, you will need to check the words to make sure the GPCs in the words have already been taught. All Spelling Shed word lists can be edited.

Remember that everything in Spelling Shed is statutory, all of the objectives on Spelling Shed’s MTP objectives link directly to a statutory requirement from the National Curriculum.

Download the spiral medium-term plan for Spelling Shed and Phonics Shed here.

Download Spelling Shed’s medium term plan here.