Pre-Phonics: What is Phase 1 Phonics, and Why is it Foundational?

If you have a toddler or pre-schooler at home, there's a good chance someone has already asked you whether they know their letters yet. Maybe it was a well-meaning relative. Maybe it was another parent at nursery. Maybe it was a nagging thought in your own head at 11 pm telling you you aren’t doing enough.

We live in a culture that is obsessed with getting children to learn letters as fast as possible. You can see it on social media, in shops, on Amazon - phonics workbooks (my biggest bug bear, but that’s a story for another time), phonics worksheets on Pinterest, and the rubbish, mistake-filled phonics games you can buy on the clock app!

In a way, I get it. Learning letters is visible, measurable, and something you can see progression with. She knows all her letter sounds. He can write his name. There's a reassurance in that kind of progress you can point to.

But here's what the research tells us, and what I see reflected in my work as an early literacy specialist and SENCo every single day: the children who go on to become confident, fluent readers are rarely the ones who got to letters fastest. They're the ones who had the strongest pre-phonics foundation before learning letters,  and most parents have never been told what that foundation actually is.

This pre-phonics statistic will change everything

Around 80% of children who struggle to read have a weakness in phonological awareness.

Let that sink in for a moment. We’re not talking about a weakness in letter sound knowledge, or a problem with phonics lessons or reading schemes. We’re talking about 80% of children having a weakness in a skill that develops before any of that. A critical skill that should be be built during the toddler and pre-school years, through ordinary everyday play.

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. It has nothing to do with print. Nothing to do with learning letters or sitting at a table with flashcards. It's entirely oral learning.

It is, according to decades of reading research, one of the strongest predictors of reading success we have. It is also precisely what pre-phonics, Phase 1 phonics specifically, is there for, and it blows my mind that more professionals online aren’t helping parents with it.

So what is Phase 1 phonics?

Phase 1 phonics is the first phase of the Letters and Sounds framework, which is the phonics programme used widely in UK schools (the name has now changed to Little Wandle Letters and Sounds, but most phonics schemes in the UK use the same progression). While most parents are familiar with the phases that involve learning letter sounds (Phase 2 onwards) Phase 1 is different in a crucial way: it contains no letters at all. This is part of phonological awareness.

Phase 1 phonics is entirely oral. It is the pre-phonics stage. Its job is to develop a child's awareness of the sounds in their environment, the sounds in spoken language, and ultimately the sounds within words before a single letter-sound correspondence is introduced.

Phase 1 is organised into seven aspects, each targeting a different layer of sound awareness:

• Aspect 1 - Environmental sounds: tuning in to the sounds around us
• Aspect 2 - Instrumental sounds: listening to and making sounds with instruments and objects
• Aspect 3 - Body percussion: clapping, stamping, tapping rhythms
• Aspect 4 - Rhythm and rhyme: developing awareness of rhythm and rhyming patterns in language
• Aspect 5 - Alliteration: noticing words that begin with the same sound
• Aspect 6 - Voice sounds: exploring the sounds our voices can make
• Aspect 7 - Oral blending and segmenting: hearing that words are made of individual sounds and beginning to pull them apart and put them back together

That final aspect, oral blending and segmenting, is the direct bridge to phonics. It is where pre-phonics ends and formal phonics begins. And the research is clear… children who arrive at that bridge with the earlier aspects firmly in place learn to blend and segment faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence.

Before Phonics is built for parents who want to get the pre-phonics stage right without having to piece it together themselves. Short podcast episodes cover all seven aspects of Phase 1 phonics, with simple activity guides and reference cards to use at home. Sign up to the waitlist here to get the early bird price when doors open!

Why parents miss this stage

The thing is, pre-phonics and Phase 1 phonics simply aren't part of the conversation most parents are having. It's not in the baby books. It's not what the nursery sends home in the newsletter. If you haven't come across it, that's not a gap in your parenting; it's a gap in the information available to you.

When a child is learning letter names, there's something to see: a colourful alphabet poster, a set of foam letters in the bath, a worksheet with letters to trace (also another bug bear of mine!). It looks like literacy work because it involves the visuals we associate with reading.

Pre-phonics looks like clapping along to a song, playing I Spy in a variety of ways, making up silly rhymes at bathtime, and noticing that mummy and monkey start the same way. It looks, in other words, like play. And because it looks like play, and because it produces nothing physical you can stick on the fridge, it rarely gets the same intentional focus.

This isn't a failure on the parents' part… it's a knowledge gap. The educational research around phonological awareness is robust and well-established, but it hasn't made its way into the everyday conversations parents have about ‘school readiness’ (whatever that means!). Nobody hands you a leaflet when your child turns two that says: before you think about letters, here's what actually comes first.

There's also a pressure dynamic at play. Many parents feel, whether consciously or not, that they should be preparing their child for school, and that preparation means academic content. Letters, numbers, pencil grip etc. The softer, play-based work of Phase 1 phonics doesn't register as preparation, even though it is the most important preparation a young child can receive.

What pre-phonics and Phase 1 activities actually look like

I want to be careful here, because I see this misunderstood regularly: pre-phonics support at the toddler and pre-school stage is not a formal programme. It's not a set of drilled activities you schedule into the day. It's not sitting your three-year-old down for fifteen minutes of structured sound work.

Good preschool phonics activities are, at their best, a way of noticing and enriching the language environment you’ve already got set up for your child.

Preschool phonics activities are pausing on a rhyme in a picture book and asking, "Can you think of another word that sounds like bear?" Or clapping the syllables in everyone's names at the dinner table. They are the way you naturally play with language: the silly voices, the made-up words, the songs, chants and nursery rhymes that children at this age are enthralled by.

What changes when you understand Phase 1 phonics is not what you do so much as why you do it, and how deliberately you do it. The rhyming game is building your child's awareness of sound patterns. The clapping game is developing their awareness that words have internal structure. I Spy isn't just a way to pass time in the car, it's the beginning of phoneme isolation.

Intention matters. Not because it makes preschool phonics activities more formal, but because it means you choose them on purpose, you return to them consistently, and you notice when a child is finding something difficult and when that an area needs more support.

When children miss the pre-phonics foundation

Most children, given a rich oral language environment, will develop phonological awareness naturally as they move through early childhood. Exposure to rhyme, song, conversation, and stories does a lot of the work without anyone having to think about it.

But some children need more explicit support. Children who are later talkers. Children with glue ear or recurring ear infections, which affect how clearly they perceive sound. Children who are learning more than one language. Children who simply haven't had much exposure to the kinds of oral language play that build these skills.

And even children who are developing typically can benefit enormously from parents who understand the Phase 1 framework and what to look for at each stage. A child who has had rich, intentional pre-phonics input in their early years doesn't just have a better chance at learning phonics; they have a smoother, more confident, more enjoyable experience of early reading. The letters make sense to them faster. The blending clicks earlier. The whole process feels less like decoding and more like recognition.

Having taught over 700 children to read across my career and my business, I can tell you that the difference is not a small one.

The letters will come, and they'll mean more when they do

I'll be honest… I used to be firmly anti-letters before school. I believed children shouldn't be pushed toward formal literacy learning early, and I held that view confidently and professionally for years.

Then my two-year-old started reading.

She hadn't been drilled. She hadn't sat through flashcard sessions or worked through a programme. What she'd had was a mother who knew exactly how to build phonological awareness from the very beginning: the rhymes, the games, the deliberate play with sound that I'd spent my career delivering in classrooms. Her phonological awareness foundation was exceptionally strong, and when letters came into her world, they just made sense to her. The sequence had done its job.

That experience shifted something in my thinking. I'm not anti-letters before school anymore. What I am is pro-readiness. Because what my daughter showed me (and what 700 children across my career have reinforced) is that the question was never really when the letters arrive. It's whether the child is ready to receive them, and readiness is built in the pre-phonics stage.

A child who arrives at letter learning with strong Phase 1 phonics foundations is not behind. They are ready. There is a significant difference.

When a child has spent their early years playing with sounds, noticing rhyme, clapping syllables, and listening carefully to language, something clicks when they meet their first letter-sound correspondence. The letter is a symbol for something they already know in their bones. The learning is faster, ‘stickier’, and more transferable.

A child pushed to letters before that internal sound map is in place is being asked to build the first floor before the foundations are poured. It can look fine for a while, but then, somewhere around Year 1 or Year 2, when reading demands increase, the gaps start to show.

What to do next

If your child is between the ages of one and four, you have a genuinely precious window right now. Not a window to drill letter sounds, but to build the pre-phonics foundation, to work through Phase 1 in a way that is playful, low-pressure, and deeply effective, so that everything that comes after it is easier, more meaningful, and more lasting.

The good news is that this work is playful. It happens in songs and stories and silly games and conversations. It doesn't require a timetable, tutor, or expensive resources. It requires knowledge. Knowing what to look for at each Phase 1 aspect, knowing which preschool phonics activities build which skills, and knowing how to progress intentionally as your child develops.

That's exactly what Before Phonics is designed to give you.

Before Phonics is a programme I've built specifically for overwhelmed parents of young children at the pre-phonics stage, before formal phonics begins. It's built around all seven aspects of Phase 1 phonics, delivered in short podcast episodes you can listen to whenever suits you, alongside simple activity guides and reference cards you can use in your everyday routine.

It will tell you what to do, why it matters, and how to know it's working. It takes the guesswork out of this stage entirely.

The waitlist is now open. Sign up here to be the first to hear when doors open, and to access the early bird price.