Sandy Chambers 

AT A GLANCE WORDS - RED WORDS  

Your child might talk about ‘Red Words’ when they are reading their RWI home readers. These are common words that contain tricky letter / spelling patterns and are difficult to Fred Talk (sound out). We say “It’s hard to Fred a Red”.  

English has 26 letters to make up 44 sounds. Many of these 44 sounds have multiple spellings. There are over 180 spellings that make up all the words in English. There are so many, that Ruth Miskin only puts the most common ones on our Speed Sounds chart. She says that a spelling has to be worth it to make it onto the chart - in other words, you’ll find it in lots of words.  

You may have seen these Red Words come home in previous years to be learnt at home as “Sight Words”. We now call these words “At A Glance Words” or “Instantly Recalled Words” because we teach our students how to read and learn these words in our daily RWI lessons by identifying the tricky letter/s for them. For example: - In said, the tricky letters are ‘ai’ (the sensible letter would be ‘e’) - In son, the tricky letter is ‘o’ (the sensible letter would be ‘u’) - In your, the tricky letters are ‘our’ (the sensible letters would be ‘or’). There are a few Red Words with an asterisk. This indicates that the word is only ‘Red for a while.’ For example, ‘he’ becomes a Green Word (a decodable word) once children know ‘e’ can represent ee.  

We need the children to read Red Words speedily, so they don’t have to stop and think about them for long. For this reason, we do send a list of Red Words home to practice but we make sure the children have been taught them at school first and can identify the tricky letters for themselves. We do not want children to receive a list of Red Words to learn ‘by sight’ at home. 

Watch the following selection of Red Word lessons from different books to see how we teach Red Words at school. Please note: the videos will only be able to be viewed for a few weeks before the link disappears. 

Red Words in Ditty - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/l1A3WZ1A/BN7bCYmv 

Red Words in Green Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/paQPr82f/BFDfitbo 

Red Words in Pink Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/nTqgJ2vj/YTdr1s9Q 

Red Words in Blue Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/jYuTyCWJ/RoFA0R3d