Read Write Inc. Set 1 is the foundational stage of the Read Write Inc. phonics programme, which teaches children to read and write by focusing on Set 1 Speed Sounds – single letter sounds like m, a, s, d.

During this phase, children learn to blend these sounds to form simple words, read decodable books containing only the learned sounds and practice forming these letters when writing.  

Fred the Frog puppet plays an important role in our Read Write Inc. lessons. Fred can only speak in sounds, not in whole words. We call this Fred Talk. For example, Fred would say “m-a-t” and we would say “mat.”

Fred Talk helps children to read unfamiliar words by pronouncing each sound in a word one at a time. As soon as children know a small group of letters well, they begin to blend those sounds to make words. During lessons, children are taught to listen carefully to sounds and blend them together in sequence to form a word. We start with blending oral sounds and then move on to reading letters and blending them together to read whole words.

Every speed sound has a list of green words linked to it, so your child can ‘sound out’ and ‘sound blend’ words containing the new speed sound they have just learnt.

For example, when using Fred Talk, we would say s-p-r-ay = spray.