Read Write Inc Red Words and Green Words

In Read Write Inc, green words are words your child can sound out with the sounds they have been taught, and red words are the exceptions that cannot be worked out that way. Green words get Fred Talk. Red words get a pause: children are taught to stop and think rather than try to sound them out. At home, that means you can simply tell your child a red word and move on. There is nothing to solve.

The rest of this page answers the questions parents actually ask about the two colours, in the order they tend to come up.

What exactly is a green word?

A green word is decodable using the sounds taught so far. That is the whole definition, and the important part is so far. A word is not green in the abstract; it is green for a child at a particular point in the programme.

Early on, when a child has only the first Set 1 letters, mat and sat are green and ship is not. Once the special friends arrive, ship becomes green too. Nothing about the word changed. The child changed.

This is the same idea that sits behind the whole approach: decodable describes the fit between a book and one particular child, not a property of the book. Our explainer on what decodable books are goes into that in more detail.

What exactly is a red word?

A red word is an exception. It contains a spelling that does not behave the way the child has been taught, so sounding it out either produces the wrong word or produces nothing at all.

Every phonics programme has this category, because English has these words. Read Write Inc calls them red words. Other schemes call them tricky words, and Essential Letters and Sounds calls them harder to read and spell words. Different labels, identical problem.

The instruction children are given is to stop and think, not to Fred Talk. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A child who tries to sound out a red word is doing the wrong operation, and doing it harder will not help.

Why are they colour coded at all?

Because the colour tells the child which strategy to reach for before they start. Green means go: push the sounds together. Red means stop: this one you either know or you do not, and if you do not, someone will tell you.

It sounds small. It is not. A large part of early reading difficulty is children applying the right strategy to the wrong word and concluding that they are bad at reading. The colours remove that guesswork.

Green means sound it out. Red means stop and think. A child who knows which is which is never stuck for long.

What is Fred Talk and when should I use it?

Fred is a toy frog who speaks only in sounds. Fred says c-a-t, and the children say cat. It is the programme's name for oral blending, and it is what green words are for.

Fred Talk progresses. It starts aloud, so you can hear every sound. Then it becomes a whisper. Then it becomes Fred in your head, which is silent, and that silent version is the destination. If your child still sounds out loud, they are not behind. They are at the stage the programme expects them to be at.

Use it at home only on green words. If your child stalls on one, wait about five seconds before you step in. Most children get there at around four, and the ones who are rescued at two learn to wait for rescue. When you do help, give the sounds rather than the word: s-t-o-p hands them the win, and saying stop takes it away.

What do I do when my child gets stuck on a red word?

Tell them. Immediately, warmly, without a lesson attached.

There is a strong parental instinct to make the moment into teaching, and with red words there is nothing to teach in that moment. The word is an exception. Saying it, having your child repeat it, and carrying on with the sentence is exactly the taught response, not a soft option.

What does help over time is meeting the same red words often, which is why they recur so heavily in the storybooks. Repetition does the work that logic cannot.

It also helps to remember what the home book is for. The book in the bag is meant to be easy, because it is practice rather than a test, and your child has usually already worked through the same phonic content in school that week. If the whole thing takes six minutes and nobody cried, it worked. Stop while they still want more.

Which words are red words?

The exact list depends on where your child is in the programme, and the school will have it. We are not going to print a list here that might not match your child's set, because a red word for one stage may be a perfectly ordinary green word two Sets later.

That is worth saying plainly. Red words do not stay red forever. As more spellings are taught, words move across. A word that had to be memorised in the first term may become decodable later, and children usually stop noticing at that point because they already know it by sight.

How do green and red words map onto the storybook colours?

Read Write Inc storybooks run in a fixed order, and each colour has a pool of sounds behind it, which sets which words can be green.

Set 1 is the single letters m a s d t i n p g o c k u b f e l h r j v y w z x, plus the special friends sh th ch qu ng nk ck. Set 2 is twelve sounds: ay ee igh ow as in blow, oo as in zoo, oo as in look, ar or air ir ou as in out, and oy. Set 3 adds seventeen more, including the split digraphs a-e i-e o-e u-e.

Note the unfortunate overlap: there is a storybook colour called Green and a category of word called green. They are not the same thing, and a Green storybook contains both green words and red words like every other colour.

Why does the book from school not match the one my child talks about?

Because they are two different books. In school your child reads a Storybook with their group across the week. The book that comes home is a Book Bag Book, and it is a different story built from the same phonic content and the same green words as that week's Storybook.

This is the single most common source of confusion in the first term. Both you and your child are describing something real. The two books are twins, not copies. Our guide to Read Write Inc books at home covers the weekly routine that sits behind it.

My child guesses red words from the picture. Is that a problem?

It is worth gently steering away from, yes. Guessing from pictures is the habit that decodable books exist to prevent, and it works well enough at four to hide a problem until the pictures stop carrying the plot.

The fix is not to cover the illustrations or make it a rule. It is simply to be quicker than the guess. If you can see a red word coming, say it before your child launches at it. Over a few weeks, the reaching-for-the-picture habit fades because it is never needed.

Do red words get tested in the phonics screening check?

Not in the way parents imagine. The Year 1 phonics screening check is taken in June: 40 words read aloud to a teacher, one to one, 20 real words and 20 made-up words, with the made-up ones printed beside a small alien. The made-up words are the point, because they cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from context, so they test decoding alone.

A threshold mark is published each year and headteachers must report the score to parents by the end of the summer term. Children who do not meet the standard are considered for a retake the following June, with support in between. Nothing about that changes what you should do this week, which is the ordinary short read.

Where to go next

If the nightly read has become a battle rather than ten quiet minutes, this piece on the reading fight is the more useful place to start. Otherwise the official programme information sits with Ruth Miskin Training, and Oxford Owl has parent guidance alongside it.

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