Description

This download-and-print moveable alphabet includes all the letter/grapheme/affix tiles you need to teach about word parts, from beginners to advanced. At the bottom of each tile is a word or words illustrating how each grapheme or affix is used.

Print and laminate the tiles, and glue them to magnetic sheets available from major stationers to create double-sided tiles. This gives you lots of alternate spellings and allomorphs at your fingertips without a lot of unnecessary visual clutter.

Use in word-building activities such as word chains/sound swaps (35 pages of these are included, to get you started, and there are more here), or adding prefixes and suffixes to words or word roots. This display is also useful to show students the main building blocks of our writing system, and give them a sense that it’s finite and learnable.

The tiles with embedded picture mnemonics on them have ordinary letters on their backs. There is one mnemonic for every English sound (except the unstressed vowel, and plus letters c, q and x are included though their sounds are already represented by /k/ and /s/). This gives learners an accurate idea of the number of sounds our writing system represents, and helps them learn major sound-spelling relationships.

As beginners remember the main sound for each spelling with the help of the mnemonic, that tile can be flipped over. If they forget, they can flip a tile back to remind themselves.

The red tiles represent word-final spellings. The bottom row are spellings used after ‘short’ vowels (a/apple, e/egg, i/insect, o/orange, or in the US version o/octopus, and u/up, or u/undies in the Aussie version, just print the version best suited to your accent and needs).

These tiles are also mostly double-sided, so you can make the word ‘cap’ with the ‘pp’ tile flipped over to show a single ‘p’, and then when you add a vowel suffix like ‘-ed’, flip the ‘p’ over to double it before the suffix, and explain to the learner that if you don’t double it, the word is ‘caping’ not ‘capping’. We put a doubled consonant after the vowel to make it clear that it’s a ‘short’ vowel.

Green tiles are spellings used before vowels, and yellow spellings can be used either side of a vowel. The consonant tiles with mnemonics on them are all yellow on the other side, except for ‘h’, ‘j’, ‘q’ and ‘w’, ‘y’. There is a green tile with ‘w’ on one side and ‘u’ on the other for use in word chains like ‘twit-quit-quin-twin’ to demonstrate that ‘qu’ is just a special spelling for the sound combination /kw/ (blame William the Conqueror).

The orange spellings are other ways we spell the vowel sounds (the original moveable alphabet system was based on the traffic light: green = go for word beginnings, orange = caution for vowel spellings which are often tricky, red = word endings).

The letter ‘y’ tile has ‘i’ on its back so it is easily flipped over when, for example, the word ‘baby’ has the plural suffix ‘es’ added, and becomes ‘babies’. The letters ‘y’ and ‘i’ represent the same sounds, as in ‘big/gym’, ‘baby/taxi’, ‘rely/reliant’ and ‘yes/union’.

The eight inflectional suffixes of English are represented in blue and grouped together in this display, and most of these tiles are double-sided because there is more than one way to write each of them e.g. third person ‘s’ as in ‘she jumps’ becomes syllabic ‘es’ when added to words ending with an ‘s’ or similar friction sound e.g. ‘he kisses’, ‘it washes’, ‘she catches’. We have short videos explaining the inflectional noun, verb and adjective suffixes if they are of interest.

The remaining tiles represent prefixes (pink) and derivational suffixes (blue). They include all the high-utility morphemes identified for instruction in this research. We have short videos showing how they can be used in word building here, here and here.