What Is Phonics Phase 2? (UK)

What your child actually learns in Phase 2

Phase 2 is where reading begins. In Phase 1 (nursery), your child played listening games — rhymes, alliteration, hearing the sounds in words. Phase 2 adds the letters: children learn the sounds in five sets and, crucially, what to do with them.

Three skills, in this order: recognising each sound, blending sounds together to read words (s-a-t becomes 'sat'), and segmenting words into sounds for early spelling (hearing 'dog' and splitting it into d-o-g). A handful of tricky words — the, to, I, no, go — joins the mix because they turn up in almost every early reading book.

By the end of the phase, most children can read simple consonant-vowel-consonant words like cat, pin and dog — and have a go at writing them too.

When it happens

Phase 2 starts in the first weeks of Reception (age 4–5) and runs through the autumn term — about six weeks, roughly one sound set per week. If your child started school in September 2026, expect Phase 2 to run until around the October half-term.

Your child's teacher will send home the current sound set — often as a sheet or on the school app. That sheet is the single most useful thing to practise: it tells you exactly which sounds are live right now.

Don't be tempted to race ahead through all five sets at home. Schools introduce them in a deliberate order, and practising the current set deeply beats skimming all of them thinly.

The full phonics journey: Phases 1 to 6

Phase 2 is one stop on a longer journey. Here is the whole map, so you can see where your child is and what's coming:

• Phase 1 (Nursery, ages 3–4): listening skills — rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, hearing sounds in spoken words. No letters yet.
• Phase 2 (Reception, autumn term): first letter-sounds in five sets, blending and segmenting CVC words, five tricky words.
• Phase 3 (Reception, spring term, about 12 weeks): the remaining letters (j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu) plus digraphs and trigraphs — ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo.
• Phase 4 (Reception, summer term): no new sounds — longer words with adjacent consonants, like tent, clap and string.
• Phase 5 (Year 1, all year): alternative spellings for the same sounds (ai, ay and a-e all say 'ay'), ending with the phonics screening check in June.
• Phase 6 (Year 2): spelling rules, prefixes and suffixes — phonics becomes spelling.

Phonics buzzwords, decoded

Teachers — and school letters — use a handful of terms that baffle most parents. Here is the whole glossary in plain English:

• Phoneme — the smallest unit of sound in a word. 'Cat' has three phonemes: c-a-t. English has 44.
• Grapheme — the letter or letters that spell a sound. 'Sh' is two letters but one grapheme.
• Blend — pushing sounds together to read: c-a-t becomes 'cat'.
• Segment — splitting a word into its sounds in order to spell it: 'dog' becomes d-o-g.
• Digraph — two letters making one sound: ch, sh, th, ng.
• Trigraph — three letters making one sound: igh (night), ear (hear).
• Tricky word — a word that can't be sounded out yet, like 'the' or 'said'. Children learn these by sight.
• CVC word — consonant-vowel-consonant: cat, pin, dog. The first words children read.

5 things you can do at home this week

You don't need to 'teach phonics' — you just need to back up what school is doing. Five things that genuinely help during Phase 2:

• Use pure sounds. Say 'mmm' not 'muh', 'sss' not 'suh'. This one change makes blending dramatically easier.
• Play oral blending games with no letters at all: 'I'm thinking of a colour: r…e…d.' Do it in the car, in the queue, at bath time.
• Practise only the school's current sound set. Ten focused minutes on this week's sounds beats an hour on all of them.
• Trace while you say. Writing or tracing a letter while saying its sound wires the learning in twice as fast — hand and voice together.
• Keep reading to them. Being read to is still the biggest driver of reading success at this age — stories build the vocabulary and love of books that phonics alone can't.

Phase 2 and the Year 1 phonics screening check

You've probably heard other parents mention 'the phonics check'. It is a short statutory assessment in June of Year 1, where children read 40 words — a mix of real and made-up words — to a teacher. It checks that phonics teaching is working.

Phase 2 is the foundation it all rests on: the blending habit your child builds now is exactly what the check measures later. There is nothing to practise for and nothing to worry about — just keep the daily blending playful and the rest follows.

If your school seems to do it differently

Most English schools now follow a DfE-validated phonics scheme — Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, Read Write Inc. and Twinkl Phonics are the big three. They teach the same sounds in a very similar order, but group a few slightly differently and use their own tricky-word lists.

So if your school's 'set 2' doesn't match a list you found online, nobody is wrong — just follow your school's sequence for homework, and use guides like this one for the bigger picture.

You're already doing the most important part

Here is the reassuring truth about Phase 2: the parents who help most aren't the ones who drill flashcards for an hour — they're the ones who chat, read, rhyme and play with sounds for a few minutes every day. If you're reading this guide, you're already that parent.

When you're ready for print-and-go practice — every Phase 2 sound with tracing pages, keywords and blending words matched to the five sets — our Phase 2 phonics pack has the whole phase ready to print.

Practise this at home

Phonics Phase 2 (Letters & Sounds)

6-page printable pack · £3.99 · Buy once. Yours forever. No subscription, no renewals.

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