Spelfabet

New, improved phonics playing cards

Our new download-and-print phonics playing cards include 8 free sample decks, the first one of each of 8 sets (90 decks). These first target basic VC and CVC words, then consonant blending, consonant digraphs like ‘sh’ and ‘ng’, several sets targeting vowel spellings, then less common consonant spellings. We now have other games targeting prefixes/suffixes, syllabification and flexing sounds.

Each card deck prints on four sheets of light A4 cardboard, and can be used for any game that uses a standard deck of playing cards (e.g. the games here). We use Sounds-Write and Phonics With Feeling printable decodables as well as Phonic Books, so our card sequence dovetails well with them, but can be reorganised if teaching a different sequence.

Learners focus more on sounds and spellings when words are presented in lists, not sentences. Turning lists into games boosts attention and engagement, two of Stanislas Dehaene’s four pillars of learning.

Our revised cards have:

• Larger print words, facing in only one direction (having words facing both ways confused some kids).

• More common words – word choice based on frequency as well as sound-spelling relationships.

• More polysyllable words, including plenty of Tier 2 words.

It takes me a couple of minutes to print and laminate a deck of these cards, then eight minutes to cut a deck up while having a cuppa, listening to a podcast or watching telly. I now have a full set in these neat craft storage boxes, for use in word sorts and spelling quizzes as well as games.

We have colour printers, so I often print a deck of phonics playing cards on 4 sheets of light cardboard for a client’s family to cut up and use at home.

If you’re coming to the Perth Language, Literacy and Learning conference next week, please come and try out these and our other games at our exhibition stand.

Thanks once again to now-Dr Caitlin Stephenson (applause!) who had the original idea for these games.

Phonics Intervention Symposium: Day 4

Sadly, I was too busy to attend the recent international Sounds-Write Phonics Interventions Symposium while it was live and free online. Happily, it was all recorded. A great thing about recordings is that you can watch them at high speed, slowing down and rewinding the best bits, and learn a lot quickly.

It’s school holidays here, so I’ve started working my way through the presentations, starting with the most recent, and helping myself focus by writing notes/thoughts for this blog post. I find restaurant menu codes (V, GF etc) helpful, so have made up codes to suggest who might be most interested/benefit most from each presentation (which could be wrong, so feel free to ignore them):

• SL = school leaders;
• T1 = early years classroom teachers (Tier 1);
• T2 = early years small group/keep up intervention providers (Tier 2);
• T3 = individual intervention providers for older/catch up and neurodivergent learners (Tier 3).

I’ll also note the length of each speaker’s actual presentation, minus the (often very interesting) Q&A.

Laila Sadler succinctly summarises things UK schools are doing to ensure all their kids learn to read. Engaged school leaders and shared belief systems are key, as well as type and timing of teaching/intervention. (SL, 26 minutes)

Lindsay Springer talks about 4-year, school-based research in Canada showing they’re preventing reading failure with screening, high-quality teaching and early intervention. Includes classroom videos and teacher interviews, graphs like this one (applause!), attention to kids’ academic self-concept and agency, and gorgeous quotes from kids at the end (SL, T1, T2, 33 minutes).

Wendy Bowen is from the Orkney Islands, which had close to Scotland’s worst reading results in 2018-2019. Then they read books by Diane McGuinness, trained teachers in Sounds-Write, got decodable books, started gathering data, organised small group and 1:1 intervention, and overcame various obstacles. Now their reading and spelling results are among the best in the country, and fewer kids need intervention (SL, T1, T2, 29 minutes). P.S. Wendy has a wonderful accent.

UK intervention teacher Sarah Horner talks about overcoming the dread forgetting curve with a team approach to little-and-often practice sessions. Each child has a Follow Up Folder, and everyone available, including volunteers, office staff and capable peers, is roped in to grab the folder and help the child do a few minutes’ practice (read a book, play a game, do some writing etc) whenever they can (T3, 15 minutes).

The UK’s Tricia Millar talks about delivering fast, shame-free, life-changing intervention to teenagers in secondary schools, giving them a sense of belonging and the ability to participate. My main thoughts were 1. OMG I need to make time to do That Reading Thing/That Spelling Thing training (yeek, I’ve been saying that for years), 2. Everyone who is interested in literacy in secondary schools should watch this, and 3. I need to find out about the Powell Phonics Checker. (SL, T3, 34 minutes).

Krystal Brady works in an Australian school that had devastating 2021 NAPLAN results. All their teachers, including casuals, were trained in Sounds-Write in 2022, which was rolled out across the school in 2023. At first their focus was Tier 1, but they also ran Keep Up and Catch Up groups, collected DIBELS data, did formative assessment, instructional coaching, collaborative planning, all the good things. They have reaped the rewards, both in student skills and staff satisfaction. More applause! (SL, T1, T2, T3, 39 minutes).

Gail Williams is Principal of an Australian secondary school for students with intellectual disability which uses the Sounds-Write phonics program. She says her school presumes student competence, including for nonspeaking students, and that “The term ‘presuming competence’ is most commonly associated with the work of Anne Donnellan and Douglas Biklen”. Eeek. Biklen promoted facilitated communication (FC), a discredited and unethical Augmentative and Alternative Communication approach, and googling suggests Donnellan condoned it. Happily, there is no mention of FC or its derivatives in this presentation. People with intellectual disability who can understand spoken language can usually learn at least basic literacy skills when these are taught well. They are very useful life skills, so it’s great to see explicit, systematic phonics being taught in a special school. (SL, T3, 27 minutes).

Sue White is an Australian writer and mum of a neurodivergent son who wasn’t learning to read at school. Realising he wasn’t being taught effectively, she tried tutoring, then started homeschooling him at age 7. Jacinda Vaughan from Sounds-Write supported her, and they used age-appropriate decodable books (starting with good old Magic Belt). He’s now 11 and reads Harry Potter. A fun, heartwarming session, full of useful tips for parents of neurodivergent striving readers/spellers (e.g. break it up, stay active, work in the car if need be), and their intervention providers. (T3, 40 minutes).

New Zealand Speech Pathologist and literacy consultant Emma Nahna discusses measuring students’ literacy skill growth precisely and efficiently with free DIBELS 8 assessments. Whole classes do benchmark assessments three times a year, and intervention students are monitored more frequently e.g. fortnightly. One minute Nonsense Word Fluency and Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) subtests are especially useful. A child’s ‘goal line’ is graphed by marking their start point and peers’ average skills at the end of the year/intervention period, and joining the dots. Many children are highly motivated to reach or exceed their goal lines. This talk includes when and how to adjust intervention; strategies for scaffolding fluency and access to text; and links to amazing progress monitoring resources and free training. Wow. (SL, T2, T3, 51 minutes).

UK educational leader Sonia Thompson uses the EEF’s Reading House (a bit like Pam Snow’s Language and Literacy House without the social-emotional aspects) as a framework for discussing the importance of phonics in achieving fluency, and thus reading comprehension. Her overview covers a wide range of important literacy topics including oral language, cognitive load, general knowledge, feedback, prosody, and comprehension strategies. (SL, T1, 52 minutes).

OMG DISK FULL of things to think about and follow up, and that was just the last day. Thanks so much to the good folk at Sounds-Write for organising this event. We’re now on school holidays, so I’m hoping to get through and write up at least Day 3’s presentations in the next week or two. I also hope this post helps others who missed the realtime sessions decide whether to get an All Access or Group Pass to all the 2025 Symposium recordings, and whiz through the whole thing, finding the best bits from your POV. If you do, please share your thoughts in the comments!

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

New moveable alphabet with embedded picture mnemonics, and free sound swaps

The download-and-print Spelfabet moveable alphabet and affixes now has embedded picture mnemonic tiles, and is useful for showing learners how to take words apart into sounds (phonemes), spelling patterns (graphemes) and meaningful parts (morphemes), manipulate their parts, and learn how all these parts are related.

This is the alphabet I use in my presentation for today’s free Sounds-Write symposium, hope you enjoy it.

There’s now a new n/noodles mnemonic that looks like Asian noodles (not pasta!). There are versions for Aussie, UK/formal Australian and US speakers e.g. with e/echo and o/octopus for US English, and k/kangaroo for rural Aussie kids who know more about wildlife than keys.

Just over half the tiles are designed to be double-sided so they can be flipped to show spelling variations. The set comes with 55 A4 pages of sound swaps/word chains to make, the first set of which can be downloaded free here, so you can check/try them out. Inflectional morphemes plus suffix -y (boss-bossy) and agent noun -er (swim-swimmer) are introduced early in the sound swaps.

There are embedded picture mnemonics for each phoneme except the unstressed vowel and the /zh/ in beige, vision and treasure, not needed for early word-building. These help beginners remember sound-letter relationships. As a sound for each letter is learnt, its tile is flipped over to show just the letter and (an) example word(s) illustrating how it is pronounced (but kids can and do flip it back if they forget):

The mnemonics for additional sounds are great for making it clear that our language has more sounds than letters, e.g. these consonant sounds don’t have their own letters:

Extra mnemonics for vowels also make it clear that some spellings represent more than one sound, for example:

Learners need to know that letters which follow a vowel often show us how to say it e.g. ‘back‘ versus ‘bake‘. Instead of ‘split’ vowel spellings, the set now has extra red consonant-e spellings, and the extended code sound swaps include switching between ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels by changing word-final spellings. There are still single consonant tiles with doubled consonants on the flip side e.g ‘t’ with ‘tt’ on the flip side, making it easy to show that ‘cut’ gains an extra ‘t’ letter (but not an extra sound) when a vowel suffix makes it into ‘cutter’ (not ‘cuter’, which is formed by building c+u+te and then knocking off the ‘e’ with the vowel suffix, making relevant ‘kapow’ noises).

The same traffic-light based colour coding (green = start/word beginnings, orange = caution, red = stop/word endings) for graphemes. Yellow spellings are used either side of a vowel. The set has pink prefixes and blue suffixes, and includes all the high-utility affixes in this Lane et al (2019) research. There are little chameleons on assimilated prefixes, to show that their last sound and/or letter often changes to better match what follows (e.g. in + mature = immature, con + relate = correlate). Colour coding lets you help kids narrow down their visual search for a tile, as you can say e.g. ‘use a red one’ or ‘use an orange one’.

There are now twelve pages of tiles to print, grouped from basic to advanced, so they can be assembled in stages, and you don’t get scissor-and-glue-gun RSI. If you don’t need magnetic tiles for a whiteboard, just print the first eight pages double-sided, the rest single-sided, laminate and cut them up for use on a tabletop. Easy peasy. Otherwise, assemble them with magnets (instructions are included) and display them in groups on a whiteboard like this, with duplicate tiles stacked to reduce visual clutter:

Only download and print the version most suitable for the English your learners speak, but if you want to mix and match them or use a mnemonic from an earlier set (e.g. if you prefer g/girl to g/goose or y/yoga to y/yawn), you can get the picture files and print your own extra tiles. If you want a version created for the English you speak (NZ? Canada? India? elsewhere?), let me know what it is and what you suggest adding/changing/removing.

A while ago I was working with a student with a flair for chemistry who called this product ‘the periodic table of spelling’. I hope you agree that it now demonstrates all the main elements (spellements?).

P.S I’m still updating the other embedded picture mnemonic products with the new ‘n/noodles’, and we’ll shortly be releasing new Syl-lab-it card games targeting polysyllable words, cleverly designed by our gamification (5 syllables, is that a Thing?) whiz, Elle Holloway, and often requested by kids we see. Stay tuned!

Alison Clarke

PS² The Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonic pictures are drawn by and © Cat MacInnes.
 

Summer holiday groups at Spelfabet

Bookings are now open for our intensive explicit, systematic synthetic phonics therapy groups in the week of 15-19 January 2024.

These are for young children (in school Years F-2 in 2023) who need extra help with learning to read and spell words by sounding them out.

Each group will run for an hour a day, and include plenty of games and fun. We will provide daily homework to complete and bring to the next session.

The groups will be:

We will provide all the necessary resources, including specialist take-home readers. We have a maximum of four children per speech pathologist in our groups, to keep the pace/intensity high. We match children carefully and ask that everyone comes prepared to attend all sessions and do all the homework.

Our groups will be held at our North Fitzroy office in Melbourne’s inner north, with attendance by appointment only. Spaces are limited, and upfront payment for all group sessions is required to secure a child’s place.  The cost of a week’s program is $720, which covers all sessions, materials and planning time, plus a brief final report with recommendations. Missed sessions are non-refundable. Private health rebates may apply, depending on your level/type of cover, but Medicare only provides rebates for individual therapy sessions.

Children not already known to us need to attend an assessment session with us before joining a group. This allows us to check whether we have a suitable group, and helps us cater for any special needs/interests. If we don’t have a group matching a child’s skills and needs, we can usually suggest other intervention options.

Please contact Tiana Knights on admin@spelfabet.com.au, (03) 8528 0138 or text 0434 902 249 if you’d like to find out more about these groups, or book an assessment for a struggling reader/speller.

Phonics With Feeling Set 10 now available

I’ve just put six brand new Set 10 Phonics With Feeling printable decodable readers into the Spelfabet website shop. Like all these books, they cost 40c per print to make 5 copies, or 20c per print to make 30 copies. You provide the paper/card, printer and assembly time, which of course adds to the real cost, but if you’re short of funds, these are a very affordable way to boost your library of decodable text.

What sounds did you SAY (not just hear) in that word?

If you haven’t listened to the US Reading League’s podcast with Dr Jeannine Herron, or watched it on YouTube, I highly recommend it. She’s an inspiration, the perfect tonic if you’re feeling a bit wearied by swimming-through-COVID-mud, as I am.

At 84, she has a wonderful laugh, rogue chickens, and is planning to write a new program, not resting on her life’s laurels as a teacher, activist, research scientist, adventurer, writer, editor, and a program and software developer.

Should we do phoneme awareness activities without letters?

If you subscribe to Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy (DDOLL) emails, you’ll know there’s been a recent storm of professional discussion about whether it’s a waste of time doing phonemic awareness activities without letters.

The strong consensus is that it’s preferable to use letters/spellings when working on phonemic awareness (though it then also becomes a phonics activity). This has been clear for a long time. I recently reread Diane McGuinness’s classic 2004 book Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How To Teach Reading, which says:

One of the most consistent findings in the literature…and evident in the NRP’s meta-analysis, is that when phoneme-awareness training is meshed with teaching letter-sound correspondences, this has a much stronger impact on reading and spelling than training in the auditory mode alone.”

p 166. the NRP is the 2000 US National Reading Panel, which did a huge review of scientific evidence on how to teach reading).

My favourite activity for teaching phonemic awareness is building and changing words/creating word sequences using my moveable alphabet. Here’s how I use it:

However, Diane McGuinness doesn’t say phonemic awareness activities without letters are a complete waste of time, and nor did the NRP.

While waiting outside a hall, pool or at a bus stop, is it worth doing a few oral-only Equipped for Reading Success or Heggerty deletions/manipulations if you have a photocopy of relevant ones in your bag, or a screenshot on your phone? Could you play I Spy Blending, using phoneme strings as clues instead of first letter names, while going for a walk, like this?

I’d love adults and four-year-olds to play I Spy Blending while travelling, waiting, doing mundane housework or otherwise needing something to amuse themselves. The adult would ask all the questions and stick to words with just two or three sounds before introducing longer words. Once a child is proficient at answering (blending), they might like to try asking some questions (segmenting), perhaps on a team with an adult at first.

Imagine if most children arrived at school knowing how to play this game, and could take turns to both ask and answer. That would be a sign that they had already nailed the two most basic phonemic awareness skills: blending and segmenting. They’d be perfectly positioned to learn how sounds in spoken words are written using letters.

It’s important to remember that different approaches can work for different groups. While Diane McGuinness was adamant that there’s no benefit in adding oral phonemic awareness activities to a good linguistic phonics program for mainstream learners, she did see a role for these activities in intervention, using tokens/tiles:

There is, however, a good argument for special training in phoneme awareness in the clinic. Poor readers have extremely maladaptive decoding strategies, guessing whole words from first letters only, assembling little word parts into something like a word, or refusing to read altogether. An ineffective decoding strategy leads to habits that can be hard to break. It is almost a given that these children (or adults) have few or no phoneme-analysis skills. Because print can be aversive, causing anxiety and even panic, initial phoneme-awareness training is more effective in the auditory mode than using blank tiles. A three-step process is necessary: developing phoneme awareness with blank markers, learning phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and reading simple (easily decodable) text.

McGuinness, Diane (2004) Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How To Teach Reading, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, p 328.

More research on this would be very interesting and valuable.