Little Wandle Tricky Words, Term by Term

Little Wandle tricky words are the words your child cannot sound out with the sounds they have been taught so far, so they are simply told them instead. Reception Autumn 1 has three: is, I and the. Autumn 2, Spring 1 and Summer 1 each add a batch. The full term by term list is below, along with the one instruction that matters most: do not ask your child to sound them out.

What "tricky" actually means here

It does not mean hard, and it does not mean your child is expected to find them difficult. It means the word contains something that the phonics taught so far cannot account for.

Take the. In Autumn 1 your child knows th as a sound is coming, but the vowel at the end does not behave the way the taught sounds behave. Trying to build it from scratch produces nonsense, and a child who is asked to keep trying learns that sounding out sometimes fails. That is a bad lesson to teach in week six of Reception.

So tricky words are handled differently. The teacher shows the word, says it, and the class reads it. It is recognised rather than worked out, and the recognition comes from seeing it many times in books, not from drilling.

The full list, term by term

Each batch stays in play for the rest of the year. By the end of Reception a child is expected to recognise all of them on sight, quickly, without visible effort. That is the target, and most children get there through reading rather than through practice at the kitchen table.

Reception Autumn 1: three words

is, I, the.

Three words in a half term sounds like almost nothing, and it is deliberate. In the autumn the class is busy learning s, a, t, p, i, n and the rest, and blending them into words. Tricky words are a small side channel, not a workload.

These three are chosen because they unlock sentences. With is and the in hand, a child who knows a dozen sounds can read a real sentence rather than a list of words, and that changes how reading feels almost immediately.

Reception Autumn 2: the big batch

put, pull, full, as, and, has, his, her, go, no, to, into, she, push, he, of, we, me, be.

Nineteen words across a half term, which works out at roughly two a week. This is the batch parents notice, partly because it is long and partly because several of the words look perfectly ordinary. And looks like it should sound out neatly. Push and pull look like they should behave like hut and hill.

The point is not that the word is strange, it is that the child does not yet have the piece needed to decode it. A word can be tricky in November and perfectly decodable by March, once the missing sound has been taught. Nobody goes back and tells the children, which is why the word tricky sticks.

Reception Spring 1: nine words

was, you, they, my, by, all, are, sure, pure.

These arrive alongside the Phase 3 sounds, which is the term of ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air and er. The reading is getting more ambitious and the tricky words follow.

Was is the one that causes trouble, because it is common enough to appear on almost every page and looks close enough to decodable that children keep trying. If your child stalls on was three times in one book, say it each time without comment. The fourth time, they will have it.

Reception Summer 1: eighteen words

said, so, have, like, some, come, love, do, were, here, little, says, there, when, what, one, out, today.

This is the set that carries a child into Year 1, and it is full of the words that make stories sound like stories. Said alone changes what a book can do, because it lets characters talk.

By this term your child is also working on adjacent consonants, the Phase 4 material with no new sounds in it. So the summer is two kinds of consolidation running together: harder words built from familiar sounds, and a final batch of words that are not built at all.

A tricky word is not a word your child has failed to read. It is a word nobody has given them the tools for yet.

What happens in Year 1

Year 1 is Phase 5, which is alternative spellings for sounds your child already knows, and it runs across the whole year. Words that were tricky in Reception stop being tricky as the spellings behind them get taught, and other words take their place.

Your school will have its own Year 1 list, usually sent home at the start of term or kept in the reading record. Ask for it rather than working from a list found online, because the order varies. Our guide to Little Wandle books at home covers what the Year 1 books look like.

Five things to do when your child stalls on one

• Wait a beat, but only a beat. For an ordinary word you wait five seconds, because most children get there at about four. For a tricky word there is nothing to get to, so waiting only builds frustration.
• Say the word plainly. No preamble, no "remember this one".
• Have them repeat it and read the sentence again from the start, so the word lands inside the meaning rather than on its own.
• Carry on. Do not stop to discuss why the word is odd; that is a conversation for a different moment, if ever.
• Let the book do the teaching. These words appear constantly, so the repetition is already built in.

Three things not to do

Do not ask them to sound it out. The whole category exists because sounding out will not work, and asking anyway teaches a child that their main strategy is unreliable.

Do not turn them into flashcards on the fridge. Words learned on a card are learned in isolation, and children then fail to recognise the same word inside a sentence. Reading is where the recognition sticks.

Do not test. If you point at a word and ask "what is this one?" in the middle of a story, you have changed the activity from reading to being assessed, and five year olds notice. The book that comes home is practice, not a test; in school it has already been read three times that week, once for decoding, once for expression, once for comprehension, so your read is the fourth. If reading at home has become a fight, our piece on the nightly reading battle is worth ten minutes.

One more thing not to do: do not correct the way they say it if the meaning is right. A child who reads said and hesitates over it has still read it. Pausing to make them repeat it more crisply costs you the thread of the story and gains nothing that another twenty sightings of the word will not give you for free.

The same idea in other schemes

If a relative uses different words, they are describing the same thing. Read Write Inc calls them red words, and teaches children to stop and think rather than to sound them out. Essential Letters and Sounds calls them harder to read and spell words. Letters and Sounds, Bug Club Phonics and Little Wandle all say tricky words.

Different labels, one instruction: tell the child, keep going. The reason every scheme has a version of this is that English simply has a set of very common words that do not follow the rules a beginner has been given, and the alternative to naming them is letting children fail on them repeatedly.

Why it matters that the books are matched

A decodable book is one where every word is either built from sounds your child has been taught or is a tricky word they have already been given. That is what decodable means: a fit between one book and one child this term, not a badge on a cover. We have written about what decodable books actually are if you want the longer version.

Get that fit right and the tricky words look after themselves, because they turn up often enough to become automatic without anyone drilling them. Get it wrong and every page has three unknowable words in it, which is when children start guessing from pictures and stop looking at print.

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.