Phonics Phase 4: Consolidation

During this stage, children focus on consolidating the phonics skills they developed in Phase Three. Rather than introducing many new graphemes, the emphasis is on practising blending and segmenting, applying known graphemes to unfamiliar words, and developing greater confidence and fluency in reading.

Phase 4 is used here on Phonics Bloom to describe a stage where children strengthen and consolidate their existing phonics knowledge. Different systematic synthetic phonics programmes may organise and describe this consolidation stage in different ways.

Specific skills that pupils develop at this phase are:

How to blend groups of consonants which are spoken together, such as the str trigraph in string and the lk digraph in milk.
Read contractions, such as I'm for I am, and I'll for I will, and understand that the apostrophe replaces missing letters.
How to read longer words.
How to divide words into syllables.
How to read compound words, such as windmill and lunchbox that are made by joining two short words together.

Children continue to learn tricky exception words. These include do, so, the question words when and what, and the verb forms said, have, like and were. Other exception words introduced in this phase are some, come, there, little, one and out.

When children write, their spelling will not always be correct, but it should show that they know how to apply phonics rules by making connections between the sounds they hear and how to write down those sounds.

As children become more confident readers, reading aloud becomes easier and more fluent. They increasingly recognise familiar words automatically and are able to sound out unfamiliar words with greater independence. This growing confidence prepares them for learning more complex phonemes in the next stage.

Phonics Bloom provides games and practice activities that can be used alongside systematic synthetic phonics programmes to support children as they consolidate and apply these reading skills.

Continue reading: Phonics Phase 5: Further Development