PHASE 4 GUIDE · ABOUT YEARS 2–3
A parent and teacher guide to phase 4 of Ready to Read Phonics Plus — what it means, what's taught, and how to help at home.
🌳Rākau means tree — full grown, strong roots, still growing. Readers in Rākau finish the phonics code and turn to word building: how big words are constructed from meaningful parts.
Rākau usually spans Years 2–3, the final phase of Phonics Plus. After it, children move into the school's colour-wheel readers and richer novel reading — the code is theirs. Phonics Plus is progression-based — children move up when they're ready, not by age, so treat year levels as a guide only.
Rākau covers the last, less common vowel spellings, the famous silent letters, contractions, and the prefixes and suffixes that unlock multisyllable words:
The superpower taught here is chunking: seeing un·help·ful or mid·night as parts rather than a wall of letters. Prefixes and suffixes carry meaning too — re- means again, un- means not — so decoding and vocabulary grow together.
✅ Signs your child is ready to move on
Pick a big word from a book and dissect it together: unhelpful = un + help + ful. Who can build the longest real word from parts?
Keep a list on the fridge: knee, knock, ghost, eight… Kids love collecting the weird ones — and naming WHY they're weird.
Say the long form ('do not'), they say the contraction ('don't') — then swap. Great in the car.
Clap syllables in big juicy words — ka·ra·ka, in·ves·ti·ga·tion — then spell one syllable at a time.
At this stage the best practice is volume. Dinosaurs, netball, Minecraft manuals — if they'll read it, it counts.
Every Rākau mystery on KiwiABC practises one focus pattern from this phase, inside decodable clue sentences — so the reading practice feels like detective work, not drill. Browse the Rākau mysteries →
Every Rākau mystery practises one pattern from this phase inside a decodable whodunit. The first ones are free — no account needed.
Open the Rākau mysteries →