PHASE 2 GUIDE · ABOUT YEAR 1
A parent and teacher guide to phase 2 of Ready to Read Phonics Plus — what it means, what's taught, and how to help at home.
🌿Tupu means to grow, a seedling — the seed has sprouted. Readers in Tupu take the blending skill they built in Kākano and grow it into longer, trickier and much more interesting words.
Tupu is typically a Year 1 phase. Children usually arrive once they can blend CVC words confidently and read the first digraphs without stopping to think. Phonics Plus is progression-based — children move up when they're ready, not by age, so treat year levels as a guide only.
Tupu introduces the double-letter endings, new consonant spellings, blends at both ends of words (st-, -mp, fl-), the long-vowel spellings ee and oo — and the star of the show, the split digraph (many whānau know it as 'magic e'):
Split digraphs are the pattern that turns tap into tape, hop into hope and cub into cube — the two letters of the digraph work as a team even though they're split apart. It's a big conceptual step, and worth lots of gentle practice.
✅ Signs your child is ready to move on
Change one letter at a time: tap → tape → cape → cane. Five minutes of this is powerful split-digraph practice.
For spelling: say the word, stretch the sounds on your fingers, then write a letter (or team) for each sound.
If blends get dropped ('fog' for frog), slow right down on just the first two sounds: /f/…/r/… fr — then add the rest.
Make it a joke at home: is it a moon-oo or a book-oo? Trying both and choosing the real word is exactly the right strategy.
Children's listening comprehension is years ahead of their decoding. Rich bedtime stories build the vocabulary their decoding will catch up to.
Every Tupu 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 Tupu mysteries →
Every Tupu mystery practises one pattern from this phase inside a decodable whodunit. The first ones are free — no account needed.
Open the Tupu mysteries →