If you’re already using my free workbook, here’s the next one

4 Replies

If you’re one of the over 3000 people who have downloaded my free Letters and Sounds Phase 2 workbook since the start of the year, your learner(s) might have finished it by now, and you might want another one.

You’re in luck. I’ve finally finished the Phase 3 book, which teaches at least one spelling for each of the remaining sounds of English.

It’s not free like the first one, but at AUD$10 plus GST it’s super-cheap for a printable, colour workbook of 101 pages. Make as many copies as you need.

The aim of these books is to help people try explicitly and systematically teaching young kids about the sounds of speech and how we write them, even if they don’t have many suitable resources, or much cash to buy them.

I thought teachers could print the workbooks on school photocopiers, make them up using the school laminator (for the moveable alphabet included with suggested sequences) and binding machine, and use them with the super-cheap leaflet-size Pocket Rocket decodable books. That would let them start using a sound-to-print teaching approach on a shoestring.

Book sized Pocket Rockets are also now available, and other decodable books which follow the same teaching sequence as this workbook include the Junior Learning Phase 3 Fiction and Nonfiction books, and the Oxford Project X Hero Academy books. Many other teaching resources follow this sequence too, just google “Letters and Sounds Phase 3” to find them.

I’m pretty sure that once teachers try this teaching approach, they’ll soon be hooked on the success it brings, find it makes complete sense, and want to learn more and invest in more polished and extensive resources. But the first step is getting them to dip their toes in the explicit, systematic synthetic phonics water, and often finances are a barrier.

I hope you like the Phase 3 workbook, find it helps kids understand how sounds and letters work, and that it complements all the other good language and literacy things you’re doubtless doing, like reading lots of stories aloud.

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4 responses to “If you’re already using my free workbook, here’s the next one”

  1. Kath says:

    Love it! Thanks you. Now I know there’s a phase 2 I can add that to my resource bank too.
    Letters and Sounds is an amazing resource. I’ve been using it in the UK and now here since it was introduced. We now have lots of Decodable books from a range of publishers, so there’s something to appeal to everyone. We have decodable take home readers from Australian Decodable Readers, Phonics Bug (Pearson), Floppy Phonics (Oxford), Pocket Rockets (in book format) and are about to purchase the newly launched ones from Macmillan as Guided Reading sets for early Foundation.

  2. Natalie says:

    Fantastic. You reference Phase 2 and Phase 3. Did you do a Phase 1?

    • alison says:

      Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds is really for preschoolers/4-year-olds, and focusses on auditory and phonological awareness, not phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, which is what matters once kids start school. I’m not sure anyone much uses Phase 1 any more, most of the published resources seem to start at Phase 2.

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