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’.

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7 responses to “1000 decodable quiz questions”

  1. Emma Nahna says:

    Love it!! Congratulations team, these are going to be SO well loved, I can tell. Can’t wait to give them a whirl.

  2. Bernadette Hovens says:

    Alison, thank you so much for this product, and thank you for what must have been countless hours of work in the preparation stage. I see a Prep student for 20 min/day (which in reality is only about 15 min) for a Sounds Write intervention. Squeezing reading/dictation in at the end of the session is often challenging, but these quizzes may be just what is needed for an application task when time is so short!

  3. Catherine Wall says:

    These are amazing! Thank you again for your high quality, evidence based products that kids (and teachers) love. I am super excited to use these because they not only require decoding but also answer the question of comprehension. Thank you!

  4. Catherine Bourne says:

    Thankyou again for these great resources. These are perfect .
    Catherine

  5. Lea Ingram says:

    Fabulous! Can’t wait to use these with my Foundation kids next week! Thanks so much for this fabulous resource.

  6. Alison Perry says:

    A great idea and resource! I’ve already heard from a mum who is using these with her “reluctant reader” with great success!

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