By the beginning of Phase Six, children should know most of the common grapheme– phoneme correspondences (GPCs). They should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways: 

• reading the words automatically if they are very familiar; 

• decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now well established; 

• decoding them aloud. 

Children’s spelling should be phonemically accurate, although it may still be a little unconventional at times. Spelling usually lags behind reading, as it is harder. During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.