📘 The red car is waiting at the kerb

What you’ll learn

1. The r that sits behindHear that r after a vowel makes a new sound, and tell car apart from cat.Car is not short a and not long a. Ar is a vowel digraph. Jar keeps the same team.
2. Car, star, farmRead the ar team at the front, middle or end of a word, and blend it as one sound.Star, farm and garden all keep /ar/. Appendix 1 and the screening check treat ar as frequent and consistent.
3. Horse, fork, cornRead the or team without splitting it into o plus r, and blend horse in three pieces.Horse, fork, corn and horn keep /or/. Section 1 of the check puts or with ar because it has one main sound.
4. Her, bird, turnHear that er, ir and ur share one sound, and sort words by the letters that actually sit in them.Her, bird and turn match in the mouth. Fern, bird and church wear three coats. Sort the team, not the sound.
5. Find the teamSpot a known r-controlled team inside a longer word, and pair words with their letters.Turtle hides ur. Matching pins car, horse, bird, church and fern to their teams. Tonight, catch three in the wild.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Department for Education, English Appendix 1: Spelling — Year 1 vowel digraphs and trigraphs. ar: car, start, park, arm, garden. or: for, short, born, horse, morning. ore: more, score, before, wore, shore. ir: girl, bird, shirt, first, third. ur: turn, hurt, church, burst. er stressed: her, term. er unstressed: better, under (and similar). Statutory spelling appendix to the national curriculum. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7ccc06ed915d63cc65ce61/English_Appendix_1_-_Spelling.pdf
• Standards and Testing Agency, Assessment framework for the development of the year 1 phonics screening check (2012). Section 1 graphemes include ar /ɑ:/ as in arm and or /ɔ:/ as in born. Section 2 adds er /ɜ:/ (fern) and /ə/ (farmer), ir /ɜ:/ (girl), ur /ɜ:/ (turn). Footnote: r-controlled digraphs such as er and ur are included in the over-arching category of vowel digraphs. Expected standard: most items containing frequent and consistent vowel digraphs; some items containing less frequent and less consistent ones. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/assessment-framework-for-the-development-of-the-year-1-phonics-screening-check/assessment-framework-for-the-development-of-the-year-1-phonics-screening-check
• Standards and Testing Agency, Phonics screening check: structure and content of the check (updated 31 March 2022). Section 1 uses frequent and consistent vowel digraphs (ar, ee, oi, oo, or). Section 2 uses less frequent and less consistent vowel digraphs including er, ir, ur, plus split digraphs and trigraphs. Forty words, half real and half pseudo-words. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/phonics-screening-check-sample-materials-and-training-video/phonics-screening-check-structure-and-content-of-the-check
• Department for Education and Skills, Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics (2007) — Phase 3 graphemes include ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er, taught as two-letter (or three-letter) teams to be blended as one sound. Phase 5 later treats ir as an alternative spelling of the /ur/ sound. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7aa7b6e5274a34770e630c/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf
• Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse, Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade (NCEE 2016-4008, July 2016), Foorman et al. Recommendation 3 (strong evidence): teach students to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words. Blend letter sounds and sound-spelling patterns from left to right. Example 3.3 covers consonant, vowel, and syllable-construction patterns including r-controlled syllables. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/PracticeGuide/wwc_foundationalreading_070516.pdf
• Institute of Education Sciences / REL Southeast, A First Grade Teacher's Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (Kosanovich, Lee, Foorman). Companion to the WWC practice guide. Glossary: r-controlled vowels or bossy r's — vowels making a unique sound when followed by an r (for example, ar, er, ir, or, ur). https://ies.ed.gov/ies/2025/01/first-grade-teachers-guide-supporting-family-involvement-foundational-reading-skills
• Common Core State Standards Initiative, English Language Arts, Reading: Foundational Skills, Grade 1. RF.1.2.a Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words. RF.1.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. RF.1.3.b Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words. RF.1.3.c Know final -e and common vowel team conventions for representing long vowel sounds. RF.1.3.e Decode two-syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables. https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/1/
• Department for Education, The reading framework (updated 2023). Systematic synthetic phonics programmes teach grapheme–phoneme correspondences, blending phonemes into spoken words, and segmenting spoken words into phonemes. Different programmes may use different names for the same GPC (split digraph versus magic e). Daily SSP is the route to decoding for beginning readers. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-reading-framework

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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