Read Write Inc Set 3 Sounds

There are seventeen Read Write Inc Set 3 sounds: ea, oi, a-e, i-e, o-e, u-e, aw, are, ur, er, ow as in brown, ai, oa, ew, ire, ear and ure. This is the biggest of the three sets and the one most parents find confusing, because a lot of it is not new sounds at all. It is new ways of spelling sounds your child already knows. Set 3 is roughly where a Year 1 child sits, and it is where Pink, Orange and Yellow storybooks come from.

The full Set 3 list

Here are all seventeen with a word to check your own pronunciation against. Say each one out loud before you try to help, because a sound said with an extra "uh" on the end is very hard for a child to blend.

Why Set 3 feels different from Sets 1 and 2

Set 1 gave your child twenty five single letters plus seven special friends. Set 2 gave them twelve vowel sounds. In both cases, a new item on the list meant a new sound coming out of their mouth.

Set 3 changes the deal. Look at the list and you will see ai, which says the same thing as Set 2's ay, and oa, which says the same thing as Set 2's ow in blow. Nothing new is coming out of the mouth. What is new is that English writes that sound more than one way, and your child now has to choose. That is a genuinely different mental job, and it is why children who flew through Sets 1 and 2 sometimes slow down here.

Set 3 is not harder sounds. It is the same sounds wearing different clothes, and your child now has to recognise them in disguise.

Split digraphs, without the jargon

Four of the seventeen are split digraphs: a-e, i-e, o-e and u-e. The hyphen is not part of the spelling. It marks a gap where another letter sits. In cake, the a and the e work together to make one sound, and the k is standing in the middle of them.

This is the first time your child has to look past the next letter to work out what the current one says, and it takes a while to become automatic. The practical help at home is to get your child to run a finger along the whole word before starting, so they see the e on the end before they commit to a sound for the first vowel.

Nine things worth knowing about Set 3 at home

1. Most of it is spellings, not sounds

Say that out loud to your child if they are frustrated. "You already know this sound. You are just learning another way it gets written." It reframes the whole set from new work to familiar work, which is both accurate and kinder.

2. The e on the end changes the vowel

Once a child notices this, split digraph words stop being random. Cover the final e in cake and you have cak. Uncover it and the a changes. Doing that with four or five words is usually worth more than a week of worksheets.

3. ow now has two jobs

In Set 2 your child learned ow as the sound in blow. Set 3 introduces ow as the sound in brown. Same two letters, different sound. When your child reads down as "doe-n", they have not forgotten anything. They have picked the first option. "Try the other one" is all that is needed.

4. Special friends still come first

The habit from Set 1 still applies and matters more than ever. Before sounding out, ask "any special friends?" A child who reads boat as "b, o, a, t" has four sounds where there are three, and the word will never assemble.

5. Fred in your head is the destination

Fred Talk starts out loud, becomes a whisper, then goes silent. By Set 3 you want most of the sounding out happening inside your child's head, with only the hard words spoken aloud. If everything is still being said out loud, the reading will stay slow no matter how accurate it is.

6. Red words are told, not solved

Red words are the exceptions, and children are taught to stop and think rather than Fred Talk them. At home, just say the word. There is nothing to work out, and ninety seconds spent on one is ninety seconds taken from the rest of the book.

7. Wait five seconds before you help

It is the hardest instruction on this page and the most useful. Most children arrive at the word at around four seconds if nobody speaks. Jumping in at two teaches them that a pause produces a parent who does the work.

8. Give the sounds, not the word

When the five seconds are up, say "sh-ar-p" rather than "sharp". Your child does the blending and gets the win. Handing over the finished word ends the sentence and teaches nothing.

9. Keep reading to them from much harder books

Your child's own reading is building decoding and speed. Your reading aloud is building vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it can come from books far beyond anything they could decode. Both tracks matter, and the second one is the one that keeps them reading in Year 3.

Which storybooks use Set 3?

Pink, Orange and Yellow. The full colour order runs Sound Blending Books, Red Ditty, Green, Purple, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Grey. Green and Purple are Set 2 books. Blue and Grey draw on all three sets.

Remember that the book coming home is not the Storybook read in school. The Book Bag Book is a different story built from the same phonic content and the same green words, which is why it looks easy. It is meant to. It is practice, not a test. Our guide to Read Write Inc books at home explains the two book system properly, because it is the single most common confusion parents bring to us.

What if my child is guessing rather than decoding?

Set 3 is where guessing gets found out. In Set 1 a child can often get away with recognising short words on sight. By the time words have split digraphs and alternative spellings in them, sight recognition runs out and the guessing shows.

The signs are recognisable. Your child looks at the picture before the words. They read pony for horse, which is a sensible guess and a reading failure. They produce a word with the right first sound and the wrong everything else. Or they read fluently right up until a word they have not seen before, and then stop dead.

Guessing from pictures is precisely the habit decodable books exist to prevent, which is why the books from school have pictures that do not give the answer away. At home, cover the picture with your hand for the first read and let your child look at it afterwards as a reward. It sounds mean. It is not. It removes a shortcut that will cost them a great deal more later.

Set 3 and the Year 1 phonics screening check

Most children working on Set 3 are in Year 1, which in England means the phonics screening check in June. A teacher hears your child read 40 words aloud, one to one. Twenty are real words and twenty are made-up words printed beside a small alien.

The made-up words are the whole point. They cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from a picture, so they test decoding and nothing else. A threshold mark is published each June and has been 32 out of 40 for many years, though it is set annually, so treat it as indicative rather than fixed. Your headteacher must report your child's score to you by the end of the summer term, and children who do not meet the standard are considered for a retake the following June with support in between. The official arrangements are published on gov.uk.

The best preparation is not practice papers. It is short, daily reading of text your child can nearly manage, because the check measures exactly the skill that easy reading builds.

What comes after Set 3?

Blue and then Grey storybooks, which draw on all three sets, longer texts and more demanding vocabulary. The phonics has largely been delivered by that point and the work shifts to fluency and comprehension. Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly rather than hard text slowly, so resist the urge to jump to something meaty the moment your child reads well.

If you want a sense of what the rest of Year 1 looks like across schemes, our overview of phonics books for Year 1 sets it out.

Where to go next

If you are still not certain your school uses Read Write Inc, the tells are Sets rather than phases and a frog called Fred. Our guide to working out your school's phonics scheme covers the rest, and there is parent material on Oxford Owl.

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.