Phase 2

Once the children are secure in the aspects of phase one, they are ready to begin the teaching of phase two which introduces the first 19 phonemes and 6 tricky words. This phase allows for the pupils to develop recognition of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences, developing segmenting and blending skills to read and write some VC and CVC words. During this phase, the children will develop the skills through the teaching to begin to read and write captions and short sentences alongside reading and writing words with more than one syllable.

In the ACET phonics programme, phase has been split into two sub-phases; phase 2a and phase 2b. Phase 2a introduces the first phonemes to the children with a focus on correct letter formation, reading and writing words that contain these phonemes in sequence. Phase 2b does not introduce any new phonemes, it focuses purely on segmenting and blending VC, CVC and multisyllabic words. It has been designed this way to embed the acquisition of the first 19 phonemes and become secure with independent segmenting and blending before the introduction of phase 2 and digraphs.

Phase 2a

In phase 2a, the pupils will be taught 4 new phonemes a week, 1 tricky word and practise reading high frequency words with the aim to build fluency and read these on sight.

The phonemes taught in phase 2 are;

s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, o, g, l, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, ll and ss.

These tricky words are taught in phase 2;

I, no, the, go, to and into.

Phase 2b

In phase 2b, the pupils will use the phonemes taught in phase 2a to develop segmenting and blending. The phase 3 tricky words will be introduced alongside the segmenting and blending focus as each of these tricky words are included in the phase 3 books, so pupils need to be able to read these words before they are presented with them in the book.