One of the most common questions we hear from parents starting out — and from teachers new to structured literacy — is simply: what order do I teach the sounds in? It feels like there should be an obvious answer, and the good news is there broadly is. Structured literacy teaches the code systematically and cumulatively: one thing at a time, in a sensible order, each new step building on the last.
There isn't one single 'correct' sequence — reputable programs differ in the details — but they nearly all follow the same logic. Here's the order that underpins the Bloom sets, explained so you can teach with confidence.
1. Single letter–sound correspondences
Start with the most common sound for each single letter. Many sequences introduce a small group of letters first (often s, a, t, p, i, n) because those letters can be blended into real words almost immediately — sat, tap, pin, nip. Teaching in alphabetical order (a, b, c…) is actually less effective, because you can't build words from the early letters alone.
Start with the Foundations set
2. Short vowels and simple blending
Once children have a handful of consonants and a vowel, the real work begins: blending sounds together to read words, and segmenting words into sounds to spell them. Secure the five short vowels here, because vowels are the hardest part of English for most children.
3. Digraphs and the first spelling rules
Next come digraphs — two letters making one sound, like sh, ch, th, wh — along with the first genuine spelling rules, such as the FLOSS rule (doubling f, l, s at the end of a short word: puff, bell, miss). This is the stage where reading starts to open up.
4. Long vowels and vowel teams
Then the long vowel sounds and the many ways English spells them — the vowel teams (ai, ee, oa, igh) and diphthongs (ou, ow). English has more than one spelling for most vowel sounds, so these need to be taught explicitly, not guessed.
5. Advanced code and morphology
Finally, the advanced code — the rarer graphemes, suffixes and prefixes, and the rule-breakers. By this point a child can decode most text, and the focus shifts toward fluency, spelling and understanding how words are built.
The order matters less than the principle: teach one thing at a time, make sure it's secure before moving on, and keep reviewing what came before.
A note on high-frequency words
Alongside all of this, children meet common words that appear constantly in text — some of which can't be fully sounded out yet. Rather than memorising whole words, structured literacy teaches children to decode the regular parts and learn only the tricky part 'by heart' (which is where the term heart word comes from).
