Little Wandle Phase 5: The Alternative Spellings

Little Wandle Phase 5 is the whole of Year 1, and it teaches no new sounds. It teaches new ways of writing the sounds your child already knows. Your child spent Reception learning that ai says the sound in rain. Phase 5 is the year they find out that the same sound turns up spelled differently in other words, and that they have to choose. Nine things are worth knowing, and they are below in order.

1. It runs for the whole year, not a half term

Reception is carved into six half terms, each with its own new material. Year 1 is not. Little Wandle gives the entire year to Phase 5, which means there is no point asking which phase your child is on in February. They are on Phase 5, along with everyone else in the class.

That changes what a useful question looks like. Instead of "which phase", ask the teacher which spellings have been covered so far and which are still to come. That is the information that tells you whether a book at home is a fair ask.

2. The sounds are not new. Only the spellings are

This is the part parents most often miss, and it explains why Year 1 can feel like a plateau. Your child is not learning to make new noises. They are learning that a noise they have made since the spring of Reception can be written more than one way.

Every sound in Phase 5 is a sound your child met in Phase 2 or Phase 3. The work is in the eye, not the ear. That is why a child can seem fluent one week and stumble the next: they have met a familiar sound wearing an unfamiliar coat.

It also explains why Year 1 progress is harder to see than Reception progress. In Reception you could watch the list of sounds grow week by week. In Year 1 the list stays the same length and the words simply get more varied, so a parent watching for a milestone can spend a whole term feeling that nothing has happened while a great deal has.

3. The big idea: one sound, several spellings

English writes the same sound in different ways depending on the word, and there is no rule that covers all of it. Twinkl Phonics, which maps onto the same phases, puts the idea plainly at its Level 5: the sound in rain can be written ai, or ay, or a-e.

Sounds-Write, a different programme with the same problem to solve, builds its whole approach on four connected ideas: a sound can be written more than one way, a spelling can stand for more than one sound, a sound can be written with one to four letters, and blending and segmenting are skills that need practice. Those four sentences are as good a description of Year 1 reading as you will find.

Phase 5 does not teach your child to make a new sound. It teaches them to recognise an old one in disguise.

4. What the spellings actually are

Little Wandle's published progression describes Year 1 as alternative spellings for known sounds rather than setting them out term by term the way the Reception half terms are set out. The 2007 Letters and Sounds framework, which the revised programme descends from, listed its Phase 5 as ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe and au, together with the split digraphs a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e.

That gives you the shape of the year even if your school orders it differently. If you want the older framework laid out properly, we have written about the Letters and Sounds phases. For what your school is teaching this term, the teacher remains the better source than any list online.

5. Split digraphs are the ones that cause the wobble

A split digraph is two vowel letters working as a pair with a consonant sitting between them, as in cake, time, home and cube. The pair is a-e, i-e, o-e and u-e, plus the rarer e-e.

Children trip over these because the second letter reaches back across the word. A child who reads tim for time has not noticed the final e is in play; a child who reads tim-ee has noticed it and is treating it as its own sound. Both are fixed the same way: cover the final e with your finger, read the word, uncover it, read it again. Let them hear the difference rather than explaining it.

6. Choosing between spellings is a new skill

In Reception, seeing the letters was enough. In Year 1, a word can offer two plausible readings, and the child has to pick the one that makes a real word.

You will hear this happening. They will try a spelling one way, hear that it is not a word, and try the other. That self correction is not a mistake to stop. It is the skill itself, working out loud, and it goes quiet after a few months as the common patterns settle. If they try both and neither works, give them the word and move on rather than letting the sentence collapse.

Spelling and reading also come apart in Year 1, and it is worth expecting. A child can read night confidently in October and still write nite in March. That is not carelessness. They have heard the sounds correctly and chosen a spelling that is perfectly reasonable and happens to be wrong for this word. Choosing between spellings when writing is a slower skill than recognising them when reading, and it keeps developing well into Year 2.

7. The books stop looking like phonics books

Year 1 reading books carry more text per page, more sentences without pictures, and stories that run across several pages rather than resolving on each one. This is deliberate, and it is where stamina starts to matter as much as accuracy.

The home read is still meant to be comfortable. In school the same book is read three times across the week, once for decoding, once for expression, once for comprehension, so your read is the fourth. Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly rather than hard text slowly, which is exactly the opposite of what most of us assume. Our guide to phonics books for Year 1 goes into what to expect on the shelf.

8. The phonics screening check falls in June

In England, Year 1 children take the phonics screening check in June. It is forty words read aloud to a teacher, one to one: twenty real words and twenty made up ones, the made up ones printed beside a small alien so the child knows what they are looking at.

The made up words are the whole point. They cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from the picture, so they test decoding and nothing else. A threshold mark is published each June; it has been 32 out of 40 for many years, though it is set annually rather than fixed. Headteachers report the score to parents by the end of the summer term, and children who do not meet the standard get support and are considered for a retake the following June. The official arrangements are published on gov.uk.

9. Where a Year 1 child sits in other schemes

This is useful if your child changes school, or if a cousin brings a different book round and the labels do not match. The programmes differ in language and order. They are doing the same job in the same year.

What actually helps at home

Keep it short. Ten minutes is plenty in Year 1, and stopping while they still want more is better than finishing. When they stop on a word, wait five seconds before you speak, because most children get there at about four.

If the five seconds pass, give them the sounds rather than the word, keeping any two or three letter spelling as a single sound. Tricky words cannot be sounded out, so tell them and carry on. And if the nightly read has become a battle, the problem is usually the battle rather than the reading; we have written about the reading fight at some length.

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, or if accuracy is fine but everything is slow enough that the meaning is lost by the end of the sentence. Describe what you hear. That is more useful than a label, and Year 1 is exactly when schools are looking for who needs more.

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.