THE KIWIABC BLOG
Your child’s report says “working in Tupu” — here’s what that actually means, and what to do about it at home.
🌱If your child started school in New Zealand recently, you've probably met four unfamiliar words on a newsletter or report: Kākano, Tupu, Māhuri, Rākau. They're the four phases of Ready to Read Phonics Plus — the Ministry of Education's sequence for teaching the sounds and spellings of English — and they're named, beautifully, for the stages of a growing plant: seed, seedling, sapling, tree.
Here's what each phase actually means, and what to do with that information as a parent.
Older systems graded children by the books they could manage — level 7, level 12, magenta, gold. Phonics Plus instead tracks the code knowledge a child has been taught: which sound-spelling patterns they've learned, in a set order. It's a progression, not a race: children move to the next phase when they're secure, not when they have a birthday. Two children in the same class can be in different phases and both be exactly where they should be.
The beginning of everything: single letter sounds, the five short vowels, and blending them into words like mat, pin and cup. Kākano ends with the first digraphs — two letters, one sound: ck, th, ch, sh, ng. The milestone that matters here isn't reciting the alphabet; it's blending — pushing /s/-/u/-/n/ together into sun. Full Kākano guide →
The seed sprouts. Tupu adds double-letter endings (puff, bell, mess), consonant blends (frog, jump), qu and wh, and the celebrity of early reading: the split digraph, or "magic e", which turns tap into tape and hop into hope. Full Tupu guide →
The fast-growing phase. Māhuri opens the long-vowel teams (ai, ay, ee, igh, oa…), the r-controlled vowels (star, bird, turn), the diphthongs (cloud, coin) and the first suffixes (-ing, -ed). The big idea: one sound can be spelled several ways, and one spelling can say several sounds — think ea in sea versus bread. Flexible readers try one, check, and adjust. Full Māhuri guide →
The code gets finished, and word-building takes over: silent letters (knee, ghost), rarer vowel spellings (eigh, aw), contractions, and the prefixes and suffixes (un-, re-, -ly, -est) that unlock big multisyllable words by chunking them into meaningful parts. After Rākau, children graduate into the school's colour-wheel readers and beyond. Full Rākau guide →
🗓️ Year levels are a guide, not a rule
The whole programme sits roughly within Years 0–3, but children move when ready. A Year 2 child working in Tupu isn't "behind a level" — they're being taught at the point where their code knowledge actually is, which is precisely how the system is meant to work.
Every KiwiABC mystery is a decodable reading activity — read the clues, crack the code, catch the culprit. The first ones in every phase are free.
Try a free mystery →