Sound Mats support children's revision of the sounds they are learning and are useful to help them when segmenting their sounds within words to write.
Chapters 2 and 3 are introduced in Reception
Chapters 4a and b are introduced in Year 1 and developed in Year 2 and beyond
Children will also be learning a number of High Frequency Words as the sounds are introduced. Some of these sounds will be decodable and introduced alongside the relevant sounds, others are not decodable at all or at least at the point of introduction and are known as Common Exception Words. Common Exception Words are made clear to the children by use of a lock symbol or a bold grapheme.