Years 5-6 Statutory Words Set 7

YACHT is five letters long, and three of them — the A, the C and the H — conspire to make almost no sound at all. It looks nothing like it is spoken, and it is a fitting word to end the primary spelling list on: a reminder that some words simply have to be known.

This is the seventh and final set of Years 5-6 statutory words from the DfE, a shorter group of nine that completes the entire primary spelling curriculum. It closes with a memorable mix — the silent letters of YACHT and VEHICLE, the Y-as-vowel of SYMBOL and SYSTEM, and the hidden syllables of TEMPERATURE and VEGETABLE. Completing this puzzle means a child has now met every word the National Curriculum considers essential through Year 6 — a real milestone worth marking with proper ceremony.

SYMBOL · SYSTEM · TEMPERATURE · THOROUGH · TWELFTH · VARIETY · VEGETABLE · VEHICLE · YACHT

A last gathering of difficulties

This final set draws together several of the spelling phenomena children have met across Series A and Series B. SYMBOL and SYSTEM both use Y as a vowel — the same Y-as-I children met in MY from S02 and the same Y carrying RHYTHM in B21. TEMPERATURE and VEGETABLE both lose a syllable in casual speech (TEMP-er-ture, VEG-table — four syllables compressed to three), and writing them correctly means saying them carefully. THOROUGH closes the OUGH family from B15 by adding a sixth pronunciation to the five children have already met (OUGH here says “ur-uh”, as in “thorrow”). TWELFTH is uniquely awkward — four consonants in a row at the end (LFTH), packed too tightly for the mouth.

YACHT and VEHICLE are the closing exhibits. YACHT (a small sailing boat, said “yot”) has A and CH doing nothing audible. VEHICLE has a silent H in the middle (most people say “VEE-icle” or “VEE-hicle” depending on accent). Both come from other languages — YACHT from Dutch, VEHICLE from Latin — and both kept their original spelling when they crossed into English centuries ago. The whole primary list ends as it began in spirit: with words that simply must be known.

Five to finish on

1. YACHT is mostly silent. Find it. Ask your child to read it aloud and then count the audible letters: Y and T, basically. Three silent letters in five. Tell them: Dutch, kept whole. English borrows from forty languages and rarely tidies up afterwards.
2. RHYTHM, SYMBOL and SYSTEM all use Y as a vowel. Find SYMBOL and SYSTEM. Then connect them back to RHYTHM (B21) and MY/CRY/FLY (S02). Y has been the secret vowel since the very first batch of long-vowel work. Closing the loop on a thread that ran the whole series.
3. TEMPERATURE is four syllables, not three. Say it slowly: TEM-PER-A-TURE. The PER in the middle is the one that disappears in casual speech. Mouth fix one last time: clean syllables make clean spelling.
4. TWELFTH ends in LFTH. Find it. Have your child try to say the last four letters slowly, one at a time. The mouth can barely manage. Four consonants in a row at the end of a word is unusual in English — and twelfth is just twelve plus -TH. Math meets phonics.
5. THOROUGH adds a sixth OUGH sound. The OUGH here says “uh” or “oh” depending on accent. Six pronunciations of the same four letters across the whole primary list: oh (THOUGH), ort (THOUGHT), oo (THROUGH), uff (ENOUGH), ow (PLOUGH), uh (THOROUGH). Six. English wins, definitively.

Completing the primary list

As a finale starter. Write the six OUGH pronunciations on the board and ask the class to provide a word for each: THOUGH (oh), THOUGHT (ort), THROUGH (oo), ENOUGH (uff), PLOUGH (ow), THOROUGH (uh). The closing demonstration that English has rules and exceptions in roughly equal measure — and that primary spellers now know enough to navigate both.

As a milestone pair task. Pairs go back through every Years 5-6 set (B16 to B22) and pick the five hardest words they still occasionally slip on. The “stubborn five” list joins the one they made in B15 at the end of Years 3-4. Two stubborn-fives, one for each Key Stage. The honest self-assessment is the deepest practice: a child who knows which words still wobble can fix them.

One-to-one at home. For parents teaching at home, this is the closing moment of the entire UK statutory spelling list — twenty-two puzzles, hundreds of words, the full primary curriculum complete. To mark it, sit with your child and read every B-series word from B01 to B22 aloud, with them ticking each one they know on sight. Whatever the final tick count, the journey is the achievement — five years of UK statutory spellings, met systematically. A cake is in order (cake from B05, fittingly). They have crossed the finish line of the National Curriculum’s spelling expectations.

What comes next

• Dolch Pre-Primer Sight Words Set 1 — or begin the US sight words series
• Short-a CVC word search — back to the beginning of Core Phonics for revision
• All spelling word searches — the full collection across phonics, sight words and statutory lists

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