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Welcome to Phonics at Limes Farm Infant School & Nursery
Welcome to our Phonics hub! At Limes Farm Infant School and Nursery, we believe that learning to read is the key that unlocks every child’s learning journey. Reading opens doors to imagination, curiosity, and independent learning, and phonics is where that exciting journey begins.
On this page, you’ll find information about how we teach phonics, explanations of key reading terms, and practical tips on how you can support your child at home. We work in close partnership with parents and carers to nurture confident, happy, and fluent readers, and we are always here to guide and support you every step of the way.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised
Why We Chose Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised
At Limes Farm Infant School and Nursery, we chose Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our phonics scheme because it is a government-validated, highly effective programme designed by schools, for schools. We selected Little Wandle for several key reasons:
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Proven & Structured Progression: It offers a clear, systematic approach to teaching reading that ensures children build their knowledge step-by-step with confidence.
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100% Decodable Reading Books: The scheme pairs directly with books that contain only the sounds your child has already been taught in class, allowing them to read independently without guessing.
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Built-In Support & Assessment: Little Wandle includes regular assessments and dedicated "keep-up" sessions so we can identify quickly if a child needs extra practice and keep everyone progressing smoothly.
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Consistency Across the School: It provides a uniform framework across early years and Key Stage 1, reducing cognitive overload and helping children feel secure as they transition through year groups.
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Home-School Partnership: It offers fantastic online resources and video guides for parents, making it easy for families to support reading practice at home using the exact same pronunciations and techniques we use in the classroom.
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language.
At Limes Farm Infant School and Nursery, Phonics is the foundation of how we teach our children to read and write. It works by breaking words down into their smallest individual sounds (phonemes) and matching them to the letters or groups of letters (graphemes) that represent them. By learning these sound-letter relationships, children develop the tools to "sound out" and blend unfamiliar words when reading, as well as segment words when spelling. Mastering phonics builds early reading confidence and opens the door to a lifelong love of books and learning.
How often is it taught?
Phonics is taught daily in each year group until the children have completed the programme and are secure in their learning. Phonics lessons usually take place at 9:00AM. Additional Phonics interventions may take place throughout the day.
Progression
At Limes Farm Infant School and Nursery, we teach reading using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics scheme. To ensure every child builds a confident foundation, we adapt the scheme’s pace to match our children's individual learning needs—which means your child may progress at a slightly different pace than outlined in the general term-by-term progression documents. We assess children regularly to track their development closely and offer targeted "keep up" sessions whenever needed, ensuring every child receives the right support to stay on track and thrive on their reading journey.
programme overview reception and year 1
How can I support my child at home?
The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home.
Find our full Reception and Year 1 teaching programme overview here to see what your child will learn and when. Please note we assess the childrens progress every six weeks and use this information to adapt our teaching. This may means that we change the speed we are teaching the programme to secure knowledge before moving the children on. The programme is always followed with fidelity.
How You Can Help at Home
Supporting your child’s phonics journey at home doesn't need to take long—a few minutes of practice each day makes a world of difference! Here are a few simple, practical ways to help:
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Say the Pure Sounds: Pronounce letter sounds cleanly without adding an "uh" at the end (e.g., say a crisp /m/ rather than "muh"). This makes it much easier for your child to blend sounds together into words.
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Read Together Daily: Read your child's school reading book with them every day, celebrating their effort as they sound out words. Re-reading the same book helps build both confidence and fluency!
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Spot Sounds in the Everyday World: Turn phonics into a quick game while out and about. Look for digraphs (like sh or ch) on street signs, food labels, or shop fronts.
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Play 'I Spy' using Sounds: Instead of using letter names ("I spy with my little eye something beginning with B"), use the phonetic sound ("something beginning with /b/").
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Praise the Effort: Learning to read takes patience. Encourage every attempt at sounding out unfamiliar words, even if they need a little help along the way!
How to say the sounds taught in Reception
How we teach blending
Once the children have learnt Phonic sounds we must teach them how to blend and segment these in order to spell and read words. Take a look at the following video to see how this is done.
Tricky words
Some words that the chidren learn cannot be decoded by using Phonics. We call these tricky words.
Key Phonics Terms Explained
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Phoneme: The smallest individual unit of sound in a word. For example, the word cat has three phonemes: c-a-t.
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Grapheme: The written letter or group of letters that represents a single sound (phoneme). For instance, the sound /f/ can be written as f, ff, or ph.
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Digraph: Two letters that come together to make one single sound, such as ch in chip, sh in shop, or oa in boat.
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Trigraph: Three letters that come together to make one single sound, such as igh in night or ear in fear.
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Blending: Joining individual sounds together to read a whole word. For example, hearing or seeing /b/ /e/ /d/ and blending them together to say bed.
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Segmenting: Breaking a word down into its individual sounds to spell it. For example, hearing the word dog and breaking it apart into /d/ /o/ /g/ to write down each letter.
See below for additional support with 'tricky words'
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