Phase 1

The first phonics phase starts in pre-school and focuses on developing listening skills. In this phase, kids learn to listen and identify sounds and remember and reproduce those.

Phase 1 includes:

1. Environmental sounds
2. Rhythm and rhyme
3. Instrumental sounds
4. Body percussion (clapping, tapping, etc.)
5. Voice sounds
6. Alliteration
7. Oral blending and segmenting

Phase 2

In Phase 2, kids learn about the 19 most common single and double letter sounds (phonemes). The order in which these sounds are taught depends on the pattern your child’s school follows, but usually, they will learn the most common phonemes starting with /s/, /a/, /t/, /i/, /p/, /n/.

By the end of this phase, your child should be able to learn and spell some vowel-consonant (VC) and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words.

Phase 3

Your child learns the remaining uncommon single letter sounds and difficult double letter sound in Phase 3. There are around 25 of these sounds such as /ch/, /ar/, /ow/ and /ee/. Kids are also taught words like ‘me,’ ‘was,’ ‘my,’ ‘you’, and ‘they’. They get more familiar with the names of the letters and their sounds.

This phase takes kids around 12 weeks to complete. By the end, your child should be able to make sounds from most phases, blend and read CVC words made from the phases, read and write new tricky words and letters correctly.

Phase 4

From this stage onwards, phonics for kids is about combining and refining their knowledge of phonemes learnt in the previous stages, introducing more spelling patterns, and increasing their vocabulary.

In this phase, kids will learn other phonic rules and practise them. These include:

1. Reading and spelling CVCC words such as ‘bump’, ‘nest’, ‘milk’ and other high-frequency words.
2. Practise reading and writing complete sentences and learn tricky words.

Your child should now be able to read words straight off instead of having to sound them out and write letters correctly. This phase takes kids at least four to six weeks to complete.

Phase 5

In Phase 5, kids are introduced to alternative spellings for ‘igh’ sounds. Children learn different graphemes and alternative pronunciations. When spelling, they will also start using the right graphemes and learn more tricky words.

This phase takes children the entire grade one before they master it, and by the end of grade one, your child should be able to:

1. Write common grapheme and say the sound for any grapheme they are shown.
2. Utilise their phonic knowledge to read and spell unfamiliar words of three syllables.
3. Form letters correctly.

Phase 6

The aim of Phase 6 is to make kids fluent readers and precise spellers. By the time your child reaches this phase, they should be able to read hundreds of words using strategies such as - reading words automatically, decoding words quickly, silently, and aloud.

In this phase, your child learns:

1. Prefixes and suffixes
2. Proof-reading
3. How to use a dictionary
4. The rules of spelling
5. Where to use an apostrophe

It takes the entire second grade for your child to master the Phonics Phase 6.