Spelfabet

New Phonics With Feeling books and author interview

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Set Three of the download-and-print Phonics With Feeling Extended Code readers are now available from the Spelfabet shop.

These books provide lots of reading practice of words with single-letter ‘long’ vowel sounds, as in ‘apron’, ‘being’, ‘final’, ‘open’ and ‘using’.

Many of these are suffixed forms of the ‘split vowel’/’silent final e’ spellings in Set Two e.g. make-making, Swede-Swedish, ice–icy, hope-hoped, cute-cutest. Word lists at the start of each book make this explicit.

The ‘c’ as in ‘ice’ and ‘g’ as in ‘age’ spellings, which often occur with these spellings, are practised in the Extended Code Set One books.

The Set Three books also include the ‘short’ vowel sounds, as in ‘at’, ‘red’, ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘up’. When tackling new words, children should be encouraged to try both sounds for a vowel letter, if the first sound they try doesn’t produce a word that makes sense. This requires phoneme manipulation skills, and the knowledge that a spelling can represent more than one sound.

Like the other Phonics With Feeling books, the Set Three books have a print-5-copies version (parent/aide) for 40c per print, and a bulk print-30-copies version (teacher/clinician) for 20c per print. Our free quizzes (downloadable or on Wordwall) have been updated to include Set Three.

Teresa Dovey (pen name Gaia Dovey, as that’s what her grandkids call her) is the author of the Phonics With Feeling decodable readers. Here’s a 15-minute interview in which she discusses why she started writing the books, why they’re called Phonics With Feeling, her academic background in English Literature, what the books are like, who they’re for, how they can be used, and some of the feedback she’s received on them.

We hope these books make decodable text interesting and enjoyable for children, and affordable for adults, and that they help kids learn to decode as well as Teresa’s grandkids, so they can go on to enjoy reading whatever they choose.

If you’ve tried the books, please share any comments or feedback you have below.

1000 decodable quiz questions

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At last, our 100 download-and-print phonics quizzes for beginning readers are available here. Each has ten questions, and fits on an A4 page. Most questions have pictures. You can download a free sample of ten of them here. Here’s a 2 minute video about them.

Kids aren’t usually keen on tests, but enjoy quizzes, just as adults enjoy trivia nights. Reading and understanding a sentence at a time can be less daunting than reading, remembering and understanding a book, even a short one.

These quizzes follow the same teaching sequence as Sounds-Write Units 1-10, and the early Phonic Books and Forward With Phonics resources, since our client base is mostly struggling older learners. If you’re using a slightly different phonics teaching sequence, just check that you’ve taught all the sound-spelling relationships in each quiz before using it, perhaps as a review activity.

Writing decodable text is hard work. The literate adult brain constantly wants to focus on meaning not structure. It takes lots of discipline to think of good questions that don’t contain words that are too hard, especially at the early levels. The whole Spelfabet team has been involved in writing these quizzes, and have been extremely tolerant of my initially vague ideas and constant revisions. It’s taken much longer than expected.

We haven’t included an answer key because we hope the quizzes motivate children to ask questions and propose alternative answers/interpretations, argue for a ‘maybe/it depends’ option and otherwise think and talk. You can act as judge, assign a judging panel, or go with the majority view. Right and wrong answers are not as important as prompting children to read accurately and successfully.

We hope beginning and struggling readers enjoy and request these quizzes, and that they help build children’s reading ‘muscle’.

Where is your evidence?

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Lately I’ve been having lots of discussions about reading/spelling interventions that lack robust scientific evidence e.g. modelling words in clay. Sigh.

As Hallowe’en loomed, I needed a laugh, so I commissioned this brief video from a talented young claymation artist called Matty Mrksa:

Hope you like it! Feel free to use it as a social media comment.