Phonics Phase 6: Achieving Fluency

In this stage, children build towards becoming more fluent readers and more confident spellers. They are familiar with most of the graphemes needed for reading and spelling, and increasingly read words automatically without needing to sound them out aloud. When they encounter unfamiliar words, they are more likely to work them out independently using their phonics knowledge.

Phase 6 is used here on Phonics Bloom to describe a stage where children focus on developing reading fluency, spelling accuracy and confidence in applying phonics knowledge. Different systematic synthetic phonics programmes may organise and describe this stage in different ways.

Developing reading fluency is a key focus at this stage. Continued exposure to a wide range of texts helps children practise reading with greater ease, confidence and understanding.

As they continue reading practice, pupils continue to learn more homophones and exception words. They should be able to easily read the exception words and longer words that they already know although they may still need to sound out some complex new words.

Spelling rules and patterns children learn in this phase focus on adding endings to words. These include:

When to add s to plurals and when to add es (examples: the plural of hat is hats but the plural of box is boxes)
How to add the ed and ing endings to verbs (examples: look, looked and looking; skip, skipped, and skipping)
Rules for adding the endings er and est (examples: hot, hotter, hottest, nice, nicer, nicest)
Adding en in words like widen
Adding ful as in joyful
Whether to change y to i when adding ment (as in enjoyment) or ness (as in happiness).

You will notice that as children become familiar with the rules for adding endings to words, the words they are able to read and write are becoming longer. To help them read these longer words, they learn a technique which builds on the sounding out and blending skills they practised earlier in the programme. They now learn to break words into syllables and to read each syllable separately before combining them together.

Many children reach this stage during Year Two, although progress varies and some may need additional time or support to develop confidence and fluency.

As children become more fluent readers, they are able to read books suited to their age and interests with greater confidence. Instead of focusing on sounding out individual words, they increasingly apply phonics skills automatically, allowing them to concentrate on understanding and enjoying what they read. This supports a smooth transition into the wider reading demands of the next stage of learning.

Phonics Bloom provides games and practice activities that can be used alongside systematic synthetic phonics programmes to support reading fluency, spelling and confidence as children progress beyond early decoding.

Continue reading: Phonics in the English National Curriculum