Phase 5 generally takes children the whole of Year 1. Children are introduced to alternative spellings for sounds they have come across in earlier phases. Children master these in reading first, and as their fluency develops, begin to apply them correctly in their spellings.

Children learn new graphemes (different ways of spelling each sound) and alternative pronunciations for these: for example, learning that the grapheme ‘ow’ makes a different sound in ‘snow’ and ‘cow’. 

They should become quicker at blending, and start to do it silently.

They learn about split digraphs such as the a-e in ‘name.’

They’ll start to choose the right graphemes when spelling, and will learn more tricky words.

They also learn one new phoneme: /zh/, as in ‘treasure.’

By the end of Phase 5, children should be able to:

• Say the sound for any grapheme they are shown
• Write the common graphemes for any given sound (e.g. ‘e,’ ‘ee,’ ‘ie,’ ‘ea’)
• Use their phonics knowledge to read and spell unfamiliar words of up to three syllables
• Read all of the 100 high frequency words, and be able to spell most of them
• Form letters correctly