Phonics Phase 4: The One With No New Sounds

Phase 4 teaches no new sounds at all. It is the phase where children learn to use the sounds they already have on harder words: words with consonants bunched together, like stamp, crisp and strap. It usually runs through the Reception summer term. Because the sound list does not change, it is the phase parents most often mistake for a plateau, and almost none of them are right about that.

Here are the beliefs that cause the most unnecessary worry in the summer term, and what is actually going on.

Myth: Phase 4 is a gap where nothing is taught

Nothing new arrives on the sound wall, which is not the same as nothing being taught. In the Letters and Sounds sequence Phase 4 is described plainly: no new sounds, adjacent consonants, with examples such as bl, cl, fl, gr, st, nd, mp, nt and sk.

What is being built is the ability to hold more sounds in mind at once. A word like stamp has five sounds and no shortcuts. Your child already knows every one of them. The work is keeping all five in order while the mouth catches up, and that takes practice rather than teaching.

Myth: adjacent consonants are new sounds to learn

They are not, and this is the most useful thing a parent can understand this term. Because Phase 4 adds no new sounds, bl is not a new item. It is b followed by l, two sounds your child has known since the autumn, standing next to each other with nothing in between.

So the help at home is not to teach bl as a unit. It is to slow the word down and let both sounds be heard: b-l-a-ck. Children who treat clusters as single blobs tend to drop a sound, which is why stamp comes out as "samp" or crisp as "cisp". The missing sound is almost always in the middle of the cluster.

Myth: no new sounds means no progress

Two phases in nearly every scheme teach no new sounds: this one, and the later fluency and spelling phase. Both are routinely misread by parents as stalling, and both are doing heavy lifting.

The measurable change in Phase 4 is not what your child can read but how they read it. Words that needed a run-up in the spring get read at a normal pace. Sentences stop being read one word at a time. That is the point of the term.

If you want something to notice at home, listen for the pauses rather than counting the errors. A child at the start of Phase 4 pauses before most words. A child at the end of it pauses at the ends of sentences, which is where an adult pauses too.

The phases that teach no new sounds are the phases where the sounds stop being effortful. That is not a pause in progress. It is the progress.

Myth: the Phase 4 tricky words can be sounded out with enough effort

They cannot, which is what makes them tricky words. The Phase 4 list in Letters and Sounds usually includes said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do, when, out and what. Little Wandle schools meet a similar set in Reception Summer 1, adding love, here, says and today.

Tell your child the word and move on. Thirty seconds of grinding at said teaches a five year old that books are a trap. Two seconds of being told teaches them the word, and they will have it soon enough from sheer repetition.

Myth: Phase 4 is a quick one

It is often a whole term, and sometimes more. Little Wandle splits it across Reception Summer 1, which is adjacent consonants, and Reception Summer 2, which is longer words and suffixes. Twinkl runs its equivalent level from the Reception summer into Year 1. Sounds-Write gives the same territory three separate units: one for words ending in two consonants such as lamp, one for words starting with two such as stop, and one for the heavier combinations such as strap and crunch.

If it feels like your child has been on the same thing since April, that is because in most schemes they have. It is meant to take a while, and the long run at it is deliberate rather than a sign that your child has been left behind by the rest of the class.

Myth: Phase 4 looks the same in every school

The content rhymes but the labels do not, which is why playground comparisons go wrong.

Bug Club is worth a note of its own, because Bug Club Phonics, the Reception and Year 1 programme, is not the same thing as the wider Bug Club reading scheme. Schools allocate eBooks at a child's band on Pearson's ActiveLearn platform, so a Yellow 1 login should show Yellow 1 books. Our guide to Bug Club Phonics books untangles the bands.

Myth: my child should be on harder books by now

Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly, not hard text slowly. A child who is comfortable in Phase 4 books gains more from another fortnight of comfortable books than from an early promotion to something they have to fight.

The book from school is meant to look easy, because it is practice rather than a test, and in many schools it has already been read more than once in class before it reaches your kitchen table. If it looks too easy, that is usually a sign the matching is right.

Myth: guessing is fine as long as they get the word

Guessing from the pictures is the exact habit that matched decodable books exist to prevent, and it becomes more tempting in Phase 4 because the words are longer and the illustrations are more interesting. A child who guesses jumped from a picture of a jumping frog has not read the word.

The cheap fix is your hand over the illustration for that page. The other one is patience: wait five seconds before helping, since most children get there at about four, and when the five seconds are up give the sounds rather than the word. Saying "s-t-o-p" hands them the win. Saying "stop" ends the thinking.

Myth: if Phase 4 is hard, something is wrong

Phase 4 words are genuinely the hardest thing your child has met, because the number of sounds per word goes up while the support goes down. Finding it effortful is not a warning sign on its own.

Concrete signals are more use than feelings. If your child is stopping on more than about one word in ten in a book sent home at their own level, the book is too hard for them today and the teacher will want to know. The same goes for a child who reads every word accurately and then cannot tell you one thing that happened, or one who has started refusing to open the bag. None of that is something to name a condition for at home; it is something to raise with the class teacher, specifically and calmly. If it has already turned into a nightly argument, this piece may help.

Myth: Phase 4 is the last of the quiet phases

Phase 5 in Year 1 does bring new material, but it is new spellings for sounds your child already knows rather than new sounds. Then the final phase turns to fluency, spelling patterns, prefixes and suffixes, and adds no new sounds again.

So the pattern of the next two years is mostly consolidation punctuated by spellings. If you were expecting a steady drumbeat of new sounds all the way to Year 2, that is not how any of the schemes are built. Our guide to the six phases lays out the full shape.

Where to go next

Phase 4 is the term where the effort goes invisible. There is nothing new to put on the fridge, and the child who was sounding out every word in March is reading sentences by July. Keep the sessions short, keep the book comfortable, stop while they still want more, and keep reading much harder books aloud to them at bedtime, because that is a different job and it matters just as much.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Pearson Bug Club, Little Wandle, Read Write Inc, Twinkl, Essential Letters and Sounds or Sounds-Write and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.