Top 10 online PA/phonics resources/activities

23 Replies

200+ days in COVID-19 lockdown and no clear end in sight, so I’m scratching around for fresh ways to target phonemic awareness, phonics and morphology online. Maybe you are too. Here are some things I was SO GRATEFUL to find. A million thanks to their creators. Please add your favourite resources and ideas in the comments.

  1. Wordwall

I think my head would have imploded in the last 18 months without a Wordwall subscription (AUD$12 a month for all the games). I’ve made lots of activities which you can use for free, and so have many others.

Only the crossword and hangman games require spelling rather than reading to play, but not to create. I therefore get kids to help me create a game online: first choose a game, type the target words/sentences into it, then play the game, then go on the leader board. Playing the game again can be part of the homework, either on a computer or as a printable crossword or word search.

2. Phonic Books Moon Dogs At Home books and other resources

We use the physical Phonic Books resources a lot, and have found their free online resources very useful during our lockdowns. So generous, and so relevant. A lot of the WordWalls we’ve created also match their books’ teaching sequences.

3. Flyleaf online portal

Flyleaf’s Online Portal contains lots of cute books from the UK which are perfect for online use, and all free at present, because of the pandemic. Again, so generous! Jen’s Best Gift Ever is my favourite, click here to read it, and here’s a comprehension quiz I’ve made as a follow-up activity (use it as a Gameshow Quiz for more pizazz).

4. ICT Games

ICT games are all free online, and a quick, fun way to warm up or finish off a session. I often ask kids to type their own lists into Help A Hedgehog, then see how many they can read before the 90 second timer runs out. Other favourites are Tell A T-Rex, Poop Deck Pirates, Viking Full Circle, Forest Phonics, and Phonics Finder. This site runs on a donation model because the husband-and-wife team behind it think no child should be prevented from learning by lack of money. So if you can afford to donate, please do.

5. Sounds Write interactive whiteboard activities

If you’re using the program Sounds-Write, this USB contains heaps of activities ready for use online. They cover the Initial Code (one-letter=one-sound spellings plus major consonant digraphs) plus vowel spellings up to Sounds-Write Unit 28. The USB costs AUD$95, and I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth.

Because many other Sounds-Write activities are provided as pdfs as part of the training, they have also lent themselves to online use (see item 8 below), and the Aussie/NZ Sounds-Write community has lots of great ideas and resources.

6. Little Learners Love Literacy apps and other resources

The app versions of the lovely LLLL books have been a great way to show young clients the books, by sharing the iPad screen online. Always affordable, the iPad versions are currently free till the end of September (at least in the Australian store). Which is so incredibly generous, and will help so many young, locked-down children learn to read. Lots of paper-based LLLL activities also lend themselves to online use, see item 8 below.

7. Powerpoint versions of decodable texts

Some kids with good keyboarding skills like typing a simple story to dictation, to create a book they can then show a parent or teacher. I’ve used some Phonics With Feeling books for this, with author permission. I take screenshots of the pictures and paste them onto slides, type the text, then use Powerpoint’s formatting suggestions to make it look more schmick. Then I save it, delete the text and save it again under a different file name. Voila! A simple onscreen reading then spelling activity with large text.

8. Adobe Acrobat Reader editing tools

We use Zoom and it has been excellent, but I rarely use their whiteboard or editing tools. The free Adobe Acrobat editing tools work much better with pdfs. You can scroll through homework and cover it in ticks. You or the learner can type, change the font size and colour, and move text around. You can underline or put boxes around target words in sound searches (we play a guess-how-many-jellybeans-in-the-jar game with these, first guessing how many words with the target sound there will be). I just wish I could turn off the predictive text! (any ideas? I’ve tried everything!)

You can also play games (like the one above from Nicole Brady) using big dots as counters. Sounds-Write, Phonic Books and Little Learners Love Literacy books all have paper-based games that can be scanned as pdfs and used this way, and there are digital versions of the LLLL books. I use the iPad or iPhone app Make Dice held up to the camera for dice games, as I’m rubbish at online dice (all tips gratefully received). Make Dice can also replace the spinner for the Phonic Books Spin, Read and Spell games.

9. Kahoot!

I’m sad to say that I’ve only recently figured out that Kahoot! can motivate many kids to do quite a lot of reading. The best music teacher in the world (hi Roz!) told me it had revolutionised her lessons. Kids are often familiar with it from school, and think it’s fun and cool. We’re writing some downloadable quizzes now which should be easy to turn into Kahoot!s.

10. Jamboard

Google’s Jamboard is another useful tool I wish I’d discovered earlier. It’s like an online whiteboard with colourful post-it notes, from which I’ve made simplified versions of my moveable alphabet for word-building sequences, e.g. here the learner would be asked to change “stitch” into “switch”:

Kids tend not to stretch or rotate the tiles the way they have in other formats I’ve tried using for this activity. Jamboard is also a quick way to create neat word sorting activities:

I get words for these sorts from my website’s sorted-by-sound lists (for same-sound-different-spellings activities) or sorted-by-spelling lists (for same-spelling-different sounds activities).

I hope you found some useful information in all that, especially if you’re still working online too. Pretty please leave any great ideas you have to share in the comments.

Phonics With Feeling books are now in the Spelfabet shop

11 Replies

Six sets of the delightful, affordable, download-and-print Phonics With Feeling decodable books by Gaia Dovey are now available from the Spelfabet shop.

You can download and print a free sample book here. It’s about the ups and downs of siblings and pets, sharing and drawing boundaries, and solving problems. One boy I know got to this page…

….and exclaimed, “That’s just like my sister! She always wants to do my things, and it’s very annoying!” He was hooked. The cute illustrations add emotion and humour to the story. Some children might enjoy colouring them in.

Each set of books has a parent/aide edition (print up to 5 copies @ 40c per print) and a teacher/clinician edition (print up to 30 copies @ 20c per print). Not as cheap as the free-till-the-end-of September Little Learners Love Literacy apps (so generous!), but an affordable way to get multiple copies of printed decodable books.

These books are intended to complement, not replace, existing decodable readers. They aren’t for absolute beginners. The Initial Code Review set is intended for children towards the end of their first year of schooling or in Year 1. The Extended Code sets are intended for children in Years 1 and 2. Depending on the child, any of these books can be used with a slightly older learner who needs graphemes introduced at a fairly gentle pace, and heaps of practice. There’s only so many times you can read the same book.

These books have a higher word count than the typical decodable book, so are perfect for consolidation/fluency work. I imagine they’d also be great for extension work for children who can easily read the shorter, simpler books that are at the right level for most of their classmates, but haven’t yet been taught more complex spellings.

The author of these books has a PhD in literature, taught English language and literature, worked in teacher preparation, and originally wrote the books for her grandchildren. It shows. They aim to provide both reading success, and the pleasure and emotional engagement which motivates children to read. Their extra length allows for cohesive narratives, entertaining plots, engaging characters and themes worth talking about.

The Phonics With Feeling books originally had their own website, but it was too much hassle to run (if you’ve ever run a website, you’ll know what I mean). I nearly cried when they disappeared, and contacted the author to find out why. I’m already dealing with the hassle of a website, and she’s really nice, so we decided to join forces.

Only the first six of an eventual eleven sets of books are available now. The rest are on their way. The original books are being reorganised to match the teaching sequence in the Spelfabet version 3 workbooks and other materials, and a few extras are being written and illustrated.

Each set of books is downloaded as a pdf file, which you save to your computer, then print with (preferably) coloured covers. We’re using 220 gsm coloured cardboard for covers, printing the covers first, via the rear feed of the printer. Then we print the rest of the book on A4 paper on the “flip on short edge” setting, then assemble, fold and staple the books with our special book-stapling stapler (probably not its real name).

I hope you like these books as much as I do, and that they make many children excitedly shout things like, “That’s just like my little sister/brother!” while getting enough practice of major spelling patterns to become skilled and enthusiastic readers.

PS on 15/9/21: I’ve started making Wordwall quizzes as follow-up activities for these books, which can be played online for free, but you might need a subscription to access the printable version. The top of the first printable quiz looks like this:

New Spelfabet workbooks and EOFY discount

24 Replies

I’ve finally finished five new download-and-print Spelfabet workbooks. These version 3 books better align with the Sounds-Write program and the Phonic Books myself and my colleagues are now often using, and with the Drop In Series books for older learners.

For a 20% discount on these and anything else in the Spelfabet shop, type the coupon code “EOFY 2021” at the checkout.

Many of our clients have memory, attention, language or other difficulties as well as learning difficulties, and struggle to make the transition from Sounds-Write’s Initial Code to the Extended Code, which requires them to learn several spellings of a new vowel sound at once.

We only see our clients weekly or fortnightly, so need lots of activities that are easy for parents to supervise at home. I thus wanted new workbooks to teach vowel spellings more gradually, with earlier, explicit teaching about morphemes and work on polysyllabic words, and reviewing prior learning in lots of sentence-writing with punctuation (having read The Writing Revolution).

I’ll be talking about meeting the needs of clients like these at the free online Sounds-Write 1:1 Symposium on May 23-28. The lineup is amazing, it’s hard to know where to start, don’t miss it!

I’ve made videos about each new workbook, in which I hope you enjoy my fire-engine red fingernails (covering ugly nail bruise from dropping a chookhouse paving stone on my finger, yeow). There are also detailed descriptions of each book in the website shop, but essentially their contents are:

Level 1: Words with checked (‘short’) vowels from CVC to CCVCC and CCCVCC (C=consonant, V=Vowel)

Level 2: Consonant digraphs, basic suffixes, and up to three-syllable words with varied stress

Level 3: “Long/short” vowel contrasts, “soft” c and g, extra suffixes and some prefixes

Level 4: Seven extra vowel sounds, four extra vowel spellings, and more practice of patterns introduced in earlier books.

Level 5: 14 extra vowel spellings and more practice of previous patterns.

Like the previous workbooks, Version 3 has a parent/aide edition and a slightly more expensive teacher/clinician edition, the only difference being that you can print more copies of the teacher/clinician file. File pictures are in colour, but you don’t have to colour print them. Most of the pictures in the workbooks are PCS, a trademark of Tobii-Dynavox LLC, all rights reserved, used with permission.

The old Version 2 workbooks and kits are still in my website shop in the “old versions” folder, if you still want one, or haven’t finished downloading ones you’ve bought. Sorry that I’ve only been able to finish half the workbooks for Version 3, I’m working on more now, but life is busy!

Hope you and yours are all staying virus-free (I’ve had my first vaccine), and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new workbooks.

We need GOOD practice, not common practice

15 Replies

I wrote an opinion piece in The Age newspaper this week called “Premiers’ Reading Challenge no fun for kids who can’t read“, arguing we need to close the gap between research and practice in early literacy education, so more kids can enjoy, not dread, the Premiers’ Reading Challenge.

I hope it’s helped put another nail in the coffin of common, but extremely poor, literacy-teaching practices like rote wordlist-memorisation (the “magic words” etc) without regard to their structure, incidental-not-systematic phonics, and encouraging kids to guess words from first letter, sentence structure and context/pictures.

I hope it also helps kill off the idea that reading is natural, and replace educational blah-blah about reader identity and teacher literacy philosophy with more interesting discussions about what science tells us about how to best teach reading.

I’m sorry they didn’t include my link to Emily Hanford’s great “Hard Words: why aren’t kids being taught to read” audio documentary, but otherwise happy with it, especially the mention of David Kilpatrick’s seminar on 19 August at Melbourne Town Hall (have you signed up yet? He will also speak in Perth and Cairns, and Sydney and Adelaide, but they’re booked out).

Of course letters to the editor appeared the next day disagreeing with me. People who agree with something they read in the paper don’t generally rush to write to the editor. Editors don’t usually give a right of reply to these letters, so I’m giving myself one here. (more…)

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.

Fact and fiction with Mem Fox

12 Replies

On telly’s Today show last week, celebrated children’s fiction author Mem Fox talked about the importance of reading to children, something with which absolutely everyone agrees.

Mem Fox’s missionary parents took her to Southern Rhodesia as an infant. They were, she explains, “very keen on Australian books being read to us, and our reading Australian books”. TV hadn’t been invented, so she developed a love of reading. She thanks three years at drama school in London for her understanding of language and thus ability to write books. I suspect this training may also have contributed to her storytime drama skills.

All good. Then, about three minutes into the interview, I thought I heard Ms Fox say that young children are increasingly unable to communicate effectively using spoken language.

I did a double-take. I’m a paediatric speech pathologist. You’d think I’d know about this, if it were true. I don’t recall any mention of a general decline in young children’s ability to communicate at this year’s Speech Pathology Australia conference, or in any of the journals I’ve read lately.

I rewound the video, and Ms Fox’s exact words were:

“You know if children don’t have language, if they can’t talk by the time they get to school, and I know that will sound extraordinary, people will say ‘what, they can’t talk when they get to school?!’, if children can’t talk by the age of four, or can’t make themselves clearly understood by the age of four, and that is, increasingly, you know, happening, they can’t learn to read. If you can’t, you know if you don’t have language, obviously you can’t learn to read language. So reading aloud is very, very important for education.” (more…)

THIS is a BORING book!

13 Replies

I’ve just watched a great 2016 BBC4 documentary called “B is for book”. It follows a group of London children from their first day at school for a year, and explores how they learn to read.

The kids live on a public housing estate in Hackney, and most speak languages other than English at home.

The film is not currently on the BBC website, but a few people have put it on YouTube. The version I watched is here, and you might like to keep it open in a new tab while you read, so you can quickly find and watch the interesting bits I describe below.

You’ll love all the children, but I was most entranced by a little boy called Stephan. An honest child with a low tolerance for Educrap, he looks and behaves a lot like a little boy I worked with last year, also a twin from public housing inclined to slide under the table.

At 19:42 on the video clock, the two children having the most difficulty learning to read in the film, Maria and Stephan, are asked, “What’s the hardest word you know how to spell?” First, they do this:

(more…)