Read Write Inc Storybook Colours: Red Ditty to Grey

Read Write Inc storybooks run in a fixed colour order: Sound Blending Books, then Red Ditty, Green, Purple, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Grey. The colour is a label for the sounds inside the book. It is not a score for your child. Green and Purple books use Set 2 sounds, Pink, Orange and Yellow use Set 3, and Blue and Grey draw on all three sets together.

If a book has come home in a plastic wallet with a colour on the front and nothing else to go on, this page is the map. It covers the order, what changes at each colour, and the one thing that catches almost every parent out in the first term.

The colour order at a glance

Read the middle column first. That is the part that actually changes.

Sets 1, 2 and 3: what the colours are tracking

Before the colours make sense, the Sets do. Read Write Inc teaches sounds in three Sets, and every storybook colour sits on top of one or more of them.

Set 1 is the single letters, taught in this order: 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. Alongside them come the Set 1 special friends, two or three letters making one sound: 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 is seventeen more: ea oi a-e i-e o-e u-e aw are ur er ow as in brown, ai oa ew ire ear ure.

So when the colour changes, what has really changed is the pool of spellings the writer was allowed to use. Nothing else about the book is different in kind.

Sound Blending Books and Red Ditty

These are the first two stages and they look almost nothing like a novel. Sound Blending Books are built to give a child repeated goes at pushing sounds together into a word. Red Ditty books add the special friends and string the words into short, rhythmic stories.

Parents often feel uneasy here because the text is so thin. That is deliberate. A child who is still assembling m-a-t from scratch has no spare capacity for plot. The thin text is what makes the decoding possible.

It is also worth knowing that the book coming home at this stage is meant to be easy. It is practice, not a test. If your child can get through it without much help, the book is doing its job, and the right response is to stop while they still want more rather than reaching for a second one.

Green and Purple: Set 2 arrives

Green is the point where most parents notice a jump. The child has the whole of Set 1 and now meets vowel digraphs, so words like see, night and boy become readable. Purple uses the same Set 2 sounds but packs more of them onto a page.

Because Green and Purple share a sound pool, a child can sit across the two for a while without anything being wrong. The work happening is fluency, not new content.

Pink, Orange and Yellow: Set 3

Set 3 is the big one. Seventeen sounds, including the split digraphs, where a vowel and an e work together across a consonant: make, time, home, tune. It also introduces the idea that the same sound can be spelled more than one way, which is the real intellectual step in the whole programme.

Pink, Orange and Yellow all use Set 3. What grows across them is length and stamina. By Yellow, a child is usually reading something with chapters and is expected to put some expression into it.

Blue and Grey: everything together

Blue and Grey books draw on all three sets. At this point the sound work is largely done and the books are doing a different job: speed, phrasing, and holding a longer story in mind. A child at Grey is close to reading ordinary books from the library shelf.

The change you notice at home is often silence. A child who used to mutter their way through every word starts reading with their lips still, and then starts complaining when you interrupt. That is Fred in your head working properly, and it is a better sign of progress than the colour itself.

The colour on the front is a description of the sounds inside. It is not a score, and it is not a ranking of the children in the room.

The Storybook and the Book Bag Book are different books

This is the confusion. 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.

So when your child says "we did this one at school" and the title does not match, both of you are right. The two books are twins, not copies. Once you know that, the home book stops looking like a random choice.

Green words and red words

Inside any colour, the words are sorted two ways. Green words are decodable with the sounds taught so far, so your child sounds them out. Red words are the exceptions, and children are taught to stop and think about them rather than Fred Talk them.

If your child stalls on a red word, just say it. There is nothing to work out. Saying it and moving on is the taught response, not a shortcut.

Fred Talk, and what to do in the five seconds after a stall

Fred is a toy frog who speaks only in sounds. Fred says c-a-t, the children say cat. It starts aloud, becomes a whisper, and eventually becomes Fred in your head, which is silent. That silent stage is the goal.

At home the single most useful habit is to wait. Count five seconds in your head before you say anything. Most children get there at about four. If they do not, give the sounds rather than the word: s-t-o-p hands them the win, while saying "stop" hands them nothing.

When the colour does not change for weeks

Colours are not weekly. A child can sit on Green, or Orange, for a long stretch while the teacher builds speed. Two stages in particular hold still on purpose, because the work is fluency rather than new spellings.

Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly, not hard text slowly. A book that looks too easy is often doing exactly what it should. If you want a rough sense of whether the fit is right, listen for how often your child stops. Stopping on more than about one word in ten usually means the book is too hard for an independent read, and that is worth mentioning to the teacher rather than pushing through.

If you are not sure the colour is right, and where to go next

Ask. A short question at the door is enough: which colour is my child on, and what should the home read look like? Teachers expect this and it is a much better use of your energy than guessing from the book itself.

In the meantime, keep reading aloud to your child from books far beyond their decoding level. That track builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it does not compete with the phonics work. Both matter, and they are not the same job.

If you are still not certain which programme the school uses, our guide to working out your school's phonics scheme walks through the tells. Sets and a frog called Fred means Read Write Inc.

If you want more on the home routine, read Read Write Inc books at home, and for the underlying idea behind all of these colours, what decodable books actually are. The official programme information for parents sits with Ruth Miskin Training and 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.