I'm teaching Prep for the first time. Where does phonics start?

If you're teaching Prep for the first time after years in upper primary, the first phonics term asks for the explicit teaching you already do, cut into much smaller pieces. A few letter-sounds a week. Oral blending and segmenting every single day. A short daily lesson that opens with a quick review of the sounds already taught, not just yesterday's. And a room where one child is already reading and the child beside them doesn't know a letter sound yet.

The year has a different name in almost every state: Prep in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, Kindergarten in NSW and the ACT, Reception in South Australia, Pre-primary in WA and Transition in the NT. The Australian Curriculum calls it Foundation. The first phonics term is the same job in all of them.

What children bring on day one

The spread is the first surprise. In the 2024 Australian Early Development Census, where first-year teachers rated every child in their class, 23.5% of children were developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, up from 22% in 2021. On language and cognitive skills alone, the AEDC release puts it at 7.7%.

Letter knowledge varies just as much. Five from Five notes that many children arrive knowing the ABC song and some or all letter names. Names aren't sounds, though, and the letters whose names hide their sound (h, u, y, w) are the hardest to learn. In a study of 337 Australian children from their first year of school to Year 3, Larsen and colleagues (2020) found letter-sound knowledge varied from child to child and from one correspondence to the next.

Two of the best early predictors of reading are exactly what Prep phonics teaches. The National Early Literacy Panel (2008) found alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness among six school-entry skills that predicted later literacy, and the link held after IQ and family background were accounted for. Oral language counts too: measured broadly (grammar, vocabulary and listening comprehension together), it was strongly linked to later reading comprehension.

Many Prep rooms also include children learning English as an additional language or dialect. A silent period, or switching between languages, is a normal stage of learning English and not a sign of a language disorder.

What the first phonics term actually covers

Letter-sounds at a steady pace. How many a week depends on your programme, adjusted for how well they stick. Vadasy and Sanders (2021) randomised children in their first two years of school with minimal alphabet knowledge, taught one-to-one, to learn 10 or 15 correspondences over five weeks, and the faster group learned the shared ten no worse. Children with weak phonological awareness may still need a slower pace.

Many sequences open with letters like s, a, t, p, i and n, so "sat" is readable once the first three are taught and printed blending can start in the first week or two.

Oral blending and segmenting, every day. This is curriculum content in its own right. The Australian Curriculum v9 asks Foundation students to orally blend and segment single-syllable spoken words (AC9EFLY10). It starts with sounds only, no letters. Blending comes before segmenting because it's easier, and words that start on a sound you can stretch (/s/, /m/, /f/) come before words starting on a stop like /t/ or /p/, as Five from Five sets out.

Don't stay oral-only for months. Erbeli and colleagues (2024) estimated, across small-group and one-to-one interventions, that oral-only phonological awareness work peaked at about ten cumulative hours, while work done with letters kept improving past 16. Those aren't whole-class time limits, but the direction is clear: bring the letters in early and run oral and print work side by side.

The year's destination. By the end of Foundation the curriculum expects children to know the most common sound for every letter (AC9EFLY11) and to read and spell CVC words (AC9EFLY12).

A short lesson, every day. Victorian government schools teach Prep to Year 2 at least 25 minutes of explicit phonics and phonemic awareness daily, mandatory from 2027. Every lesson starts by revisiting earlier sounds, so the code keeps building on itself.

Why the pace feels so different

In Year 5 your class can already read, so a quick model of a new idea is often enough. In Prep the same sound comes back tomorrow, next week and next month, and that's the plan working.

Working memory is the reason. Cowan (2001) put adult capacity at about four chunks, and young children holding new material manage fewer. A child sounding out "sat" has to hold /s/ and /a/ while working out /t/. Every unfamiliar sound uses up a slot, which is why early words use only taught sounds and new ones arrive a few at a time.

The payoff is biggest now. The National Reading Panel (2000) found systematic phonics had an effect size of 0.55 in the first two years of school, against 0.27 in later grades. Five from Five quotes the rule many Prep teachers live by: as fast as you can, but as slow as you must.

What carries over from upper primary

More than you'd think. Australia's Literacy Hub explicit instruction model for phonics builds every lesson from a daily review of previously taught content and an explicit teaching section, then modelling, guided practice, a check for understanding and independent practice. That's the I do, We do, You do you already run. AERO's guide to explicit instruction covers the same ground.

These come with you unchanged:

• Checking before releasing. Rosenshine (2012) recommends about 80% success during guided practice before children work alone. Below that, they practise errors.
• Whole-class response. Choral response to a grapheme card, mini whiteboards for a dictated sound, thumbs up for "did you hear /m/?".
• Routines. Keep the lesson shape the same every day, so children's effort goes on the new sound rather than on working out what comes next. Prep children lean on that even more than older ones.

The bit to turn up is modelling. A 2025 meta-analysis by Tetzlaff and colleagues found novices learn better from high-assistance teaching and more expert learners from low-assistance teaching. The heavy scaffolding a Year 5 would roll their eyes at is what a Prep beginner needs.

What doesn't carry over

Independent reading of whatever's on the shelf. A Prep reader can only decode the sounds you've taught. Books for them to read need to match your sequence, which is the job decodable readers do and levelled readers don't. Five from Five suggests holding off on passages until a child reads four regular words in a list without error.

Long tasks and multi-step instructions. Give one step, check it's done, give the next.

Discovery tasks. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) argued minimal guidance only works for learners who already have the background knowledge, and for print, Prep children don't have it yet.

What to set up in the holidays

• Get your school's scope and sequence, and know the first five weeks of it cold.
• Practise stretching sounds out loud. Gonzalez-Frey and Ehri (2021) found connected phonation ("sssaaat", no gaps) worked better for beginning decoders than separated sounds ("s, a, t"). Say it in the car until it feels normal.
• Make the kit. Grapheme cards for the first sounds, laminated sound boxes with counters, and a set of mini whiteboards.
• Fix your lesson shape so day 40 looks like day one: review, new sound, blending, segmenting, a little writing.
• Plan the independent tasks the rest of the class can do while you're with a group. There's a whole article on those, and another on why handwriting letters beats tracing them.

The first fortnight

1. Start oral blending on day one. Say "/m/ /o/ /p/", the class says "mop". Five minutes, every day, no letters yet.
2. Teach the first letter-sounds and blend the first printed word as soon as you have three.
3. Find out where everyone is. A quick letter-sound check and an oral blending check, one child at a time, shows you the spread in your room. NSW public schools run the Best Start Kindergarten Assessment in the first five weeks anyway. This article sorts which checks do which job.
4. Keep the code lesson whole class. Groups come later and practise what you just taught.
5. Read aloud every day. Rich books, lots of talk, well above what they can decode. Phonics doesn't replace oral language and vocabulary.

Planning the first term

Once you have your school's sequence, Phonicspal builds phonics lessons that only use the sounds your class has been taught so far, with review of earlier sounds built in. See how lesson planning works.

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Curriculum descriptors are from ACARA's Australian Curriculum v9 English scope and sequence. AEDC figures are published by the Australian Government Department of Education. The Victorian daily minimum is from the Premier's December 2024 release.