KS1 · Year 1 · Ages 5–6
Children leave the nest of Reception and start to fly. Year 1 is Phase 5: meeting new graphemes and discovering that English likes to spell the same sound in lots of different ways. It's also the year of the Phonics Screening Check.
Phase 5 introduces fresh spellings for sounds children already know. Tap a tile to hear it; the example word is underneath.
A vowel and an e with a letter between them — the e reaches over and changes the vowel.
Bossy e. Write kit. Add a magic e. Read it: kite. Try hop / hope, tub / tube. The e doesn't make a sound — it changes the vowel.
One of Year 1's big jobs is noticing that the same sound can be written in many ways. Here's the long-vowel forest.
rain · day · cake · they · eight
feet · sea · these · chief · happy
night · pie · bike · sky
boat · snow · home · toe
moon · blue · tube · new
fork · saw · Paul · talk · more
Sort it. Give a stack of word cards (cake, train, eight, day). Children sort under the spelling family heading. Brilliant for the screening check too — they're rehearsing alternative spellings.
The other side of the coin: a single grapheme can sound different in different words. Try reading both pairs aloud.
Encourage children to try a sound — and if the word doesn't sound right, swap to another. Have-a-go is a phonics superpower.
In June of Year 1, children meet the national Phonics Screening Check: 40 words, 20 real and 20 nonsense ("alien") words like dax or shrop. The pass mark hovers around 32. It's a check, not a test — its job is to find children who'd benefit from extra support.
Whether a child can decode a word using only the letters in front of them — without leaning on guesswork or pictures. Practising alien words is brilliant: they can't fake their way through.
Confident readers head deeper into the woods to The Foragers' Glade for Phase 6.