Little Wandle Phase 3: The Sounds, and a Book Made Only From Them

Little Wandle Phase 3 is the Reception spring term, and it teaches thirteen new sounds: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air and er. All of them are written with two or three letters rather than one. Spring 1 introduces them. Spring 2 adds no new sounds at all and is spent consolidating, with longer words. The tricky words for Spring 1 are was, you, they, my, by, all, are, sure and pure.

This is the term when reading starts to sound like reading. Autumn was cat and pin. Spring is rain, night, farm and coin, and the difference is audible across the kitchen table.

Where Phase 3 sits in the year

Little Wandle pins phases to terms rather than to children, so if your child is in Reception and the daffodils are out, they are in Phase 3. There is no gate to pass and nothing to revise for. The class moves through it together while the teacher keeps track of individuals inside that.

The thing that changes in Phase 3

In the autumn, almost every sound was one letter. In the spring, almost every new sound is two or three letters working as a single unit. The word night has five letters and three sounds: n, igh, t. The word rain has four letters and three sounds: r, ai, n.

This is the single idea your child has to absorb this term, and it is a genuinely big one. Up to now, one letter has meant one sound, reliably. Now the eye has to learn to take in ai as one thing rather than an a followed by an i. Most children need a few weeks of seeing it before it feels automatic, and a few of them wobble backwards for a fortnight first. That is normal and it is not a sign of anything.

Reading the thirteen out loud

It helps to hear the sounds as sounds rather than as letter pairs. Say them cleanly, without an "uh" on the end: ai as in rain, ee as in feet, igh as in light, oa as in boat, oo, ar as in farm, or as in fork, ur as in burn, ow as in cow, oi as in coin, ear as in hear, air as in chair, er as in letter.

The awkward one is oo, which does two jobs in English: the sound in book and the sound in moon. Your child will be shown both. If they read book with the moon sound, they have not made a mistake so much as picked the wrong one of two. Say the word the right way, let them hear it, carry on.

Phase 3 is the term a child stops reading letters and starts reading spellings.

The tricky words that arrive with them

Spring 1 brings was, you, they, my, by, all, are, sure and pure. These sit alongside the autumn set, which included is, I, the, put, pull, go, no, to, into, she, he, of, we, me and be.

Tricky words cannot be worked out with the sounds taught so far, which is precisely what makes them tricky. So do not ask your child to sound them out. When they stall on was, say it, let them keep the thread of the story, and move on. We have a term by term list in our guide to Little Wandle books at home.

Spring 2: the term with nothing new in it

Spring 2 introduces no new sounds. Parents sometimes read that as the class stalling, or as their child being held back. It is neither.

Thirteen sounds in half a term is a lot, and knowing a sound is not the same as reading it at speed in the middle of a word you have never seen. Spring 2 is where the thirteen stop being a list and start being automatic, and where words get longer: two syllables, endings, more of them per page. Consolidation terms are where fluency is actually built, and fluency comes from reading easy text quickly rather than hard text slowly.

A book made only from these sounds

The point of a decodable book in the spring term is that it contains nothing your child has not been taught. Every word is either built from Phase 2 and Phase 3 sounds or is a tricky word they have already been given. Nothing needs guessing, because nothing is unguessable.

That is why the books can look thin. In school the same title is read three times across the week: once for decoding, once for expression, once for comprehension. Then it comes home, so your read is the fourth. It is meant to be easy at that point. It is practice, not a test. If that idea is new, our explanation of what decodable books are goes into it properly.

What the thirteen sounds unlock

It is worth noticing how much of ordinary English these thirteen open up. With Phase 2 and Phase 3 together, a child can read train, sheep, fright, float, spoon, shark, storm, church, brown, spoil, beard, stairs and hammer. Autumn gave them three letter words. Spring gives them most of a page.

That shift changes what reading feels like. A book made only of cat, pin and hop can only ever be about a cat, a pin or a hop. Once ai, igh and ar are in play, a story can have weather in it, and a forest, and somebody running away from something. Children notice that, and it is often the term when a reluctant reader decides the whole business might be worth the effort after all.

It also means the reading gets slower before it gets faster, because there is simply more on each line. A child who was rattling through six word pages in December may sound laboured in February. Slower reading of harder words is progress, not a slip backwards. The speed returns during Spring 2, which is exactly what Spring 2 is for.

What to do at the kitchen table

Sit alongside them and let them hold the book. Read the title yourself so the story starts warm.

When they stop, wait five seconds. Most children get there at around four, and the waiting is where the work happens. If the five seconds pass, do not supply the word and do not say "sound it out" again. Give them the sounds: "r, ai, n." Notice that you say ai as one sound, not two. Then let them say rain, and the win is theirs.

If they read the ai as two separate sounds and end up with something like "r-a-i-n", run your finger under the ai and say "that is one sound here". That single move, repeated over a couple of weeks, is most of what parents need to do in Phase 3.

The wobbles worth expecting

Three are common enough to predict. Words that suddenly get harder because they are longer rather than because the sounds are new, which is what Spring 2 is for. Confusion between ur, er and ar, which sound close in many English accents and often settle on their own. And a child who was confident in the autumn sounding hesitant in January, because the ground has genuinely shifted under them.

Raise it with the teacher if your child is stopping on more than about one word in ten in a book that should be at their level, if they have stopped blending altogether, or if reading has turned into a refusal rather than a chore. Describe what you see at home. That is far more useful than a label, and the teacher will have seen this pattern many times.

What comes after the spring

Summer 1 and Summer 2 are Phase 4, which again teaches no new sounds. Instead, children handle adjacent consonants, where several consonants sit side by side in words like stamp and crisp, and then longer words and suffixes. Year 1 is Phase 5, which is alternative spellings for sounds they already know. If you want the wider map of how phases are numbered across schemes, we have written about the Letters and Sounds phases.

Through all of it, keep reading aloud to them from books far beyond what they can decode. That track builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it does not have to wait for the phonics to catch up. Little Wandle publish their own guidance for families, including clips of how each sound is pronounced, on their parents resources page.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Little Wandle and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.