Stage 3: Looking for Patterns (roughly 7-9 year olds)

begin to focus more on finding familiar patterns or chunks within words
need context clues less as they decode, but still may use the text to help them figure out unknown words
begin to read silently, without needing to vocalize
reading becomes more fluent as they are able to think past word-by-word to phrase-by-phrase
comprehension comes more naturally as they don’t have to spend as much time decoding and can focus more on comprehending
self-correct when text doesn’t make sense
non-fiction is typically harder for them to comprehend than fiction because of its specific vocabulary, text features and text structures
sight word vocabulary greatly increases

(WTW 3^rd ed, 23 & Reading Development)

are comfortable spelling short vowel words (CVC)
as spellers progress within the stage they:
- spell r-influenced words correctly (words with ir, er, ur, and or)
- spell less frequently used vowel patterns correctly (such as toil or chew)
- learn how to spell most one-syllable long vowel words, but will still confuse sometimes
towards the end of the stage, spellers can spell most any regular one-syllable word (words like weight may still confuse them)

WTW calls them Within Word Pattern Spellers