Spelfabet

Revised Affixit 20 game

As soon as you finish making something, you think of ways to improve it. Always. Sigh.

Affixit game 20 was meant to focus on building words like music-musician, magic-magician, and Egypt-Egyptian, but there weren’t enough suitable words, so -al/-ial as in centre-central, deny-denial, finance-financial became the focus. While making the label for our Affixit games storage boxes (download it free here if you like), I realised -al/-ial was already in Affixit game 17. Gah.

This meant I had to make a new Affixit game 20, which teaches how words ending in ‘mit’ change to ‘miss’ (as in admit-admission, permit-permissible, submit-submissive) before some suffixes (Latin ones). The wonderful Saoirse helped me make a video to demonstrate the new game:

You can download this new game free here.

I’m now stopping myself from thinking about ways to improve the Affixit games so I can focus on revising our phonics playing cards (more compact sets with larger font, words facing one way, difficult words replaced, and extra game instructions). Always ways to improve…

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Free Affixit game

Hooray, you can now download and print Game 1 of our new Affixit word-building games for $0. Players build and spell words by adding suffixes -s, -ed or -ing to base words, doubling final consonants when necessary (e.g. stop-stopped), and knowing when not to double (e.g. mend-mending, back-backs).

Base words are spelt in basic/initial code – the alphabet plus ff, ll, sh, ch, th, ng and ck – and are CVC, CCVC or CVCC words, with one CCCVC word (‘strum’). Many common one-syllable verbs like ‘win’, ‘swim’ and ‘bend’ have irregular past forms, so don’t take suffix -ed, and these were excluded. We don’t want to confuse kids with language delay/disorder who still sometimes say things like ‘swimmed’ and ‘runned’.

Game 1 targets the suffixes and juncture changes taught in Foundation Term 4 of my state’s Phonics Plus teaching sequence. Our Term 4 starts today, so I hope this game is well-timed and widely used. It should also slot neatly into other phonics teaching sequences, towards the end of the basic/initial code.

Here’s a video of me playing Affixit 1 with student Saoirse (thanks, Saoirse!):

Sorry about my messy handwriting, I was trying not to bump our wonky tripod (very hi-tech here, not).

There are 24 Affixit games in total, grouped in two sets. They target almost all the prefixes and suffixes in Phonics Plus (I’m still thinking about prefixes sub-, non- and mis-), and a few extras. They should be easy to slot into other phonics sequences, as base word spelling complexity increases gradually, and each game only targets a small number of affixes. The games took weeks to develop and test, aiming to maximise the number of common words players can build and spell in each game.

All the Affixit games are available in two download-and-print sets of a dozen from www.spelfabet.com.au/product-category/games/affixit. They cost two Australian dollars per game (plus GST if you’re in Australia) which is about USD$1.30. Each game prints on three sheets of A4 light card. We printed ours on photo paper, so we didn’t have to laminate them (quicker and less plastic, yay!). They fit neatly into two craft storage boxes we got from a hardware store, here’s what they look like:

I’ve put videos demonstrating each game on YouTube, just click on these links:

Affixit game 1          Affixit game 2          Affixit game 3          Affixit game 4

Affixit game 5          Affixit game 6          Affixit game 7          Affixit game 8

Affixit game 9          Affixit game 10        Affixit game 11        Affixit game 12

Affixit game 13 Affixit game 14 Affixit game 15 Affixit game 16

Affixit game 17 Affixit game 18 Affixit game 19 Affixit game 20

Affixit game 21 Affixit game 22 Affixit game 23 Affixit game 24

Georgina Ryan devised the original version of this game, with help of Elle Holloway.

Feel free to print multiple copies of any Spelfabet games purchased for your own class/students. I hope this makes them an affordable way to provide lots of well-targeted reading/spelling skills practice, cleverly disguised as fun. Please don’t share them across a school or school system. They take time and expertise to make, and their sales help pay for the Spelfabet website.

Alison Clarke

New polysyllable word games

Do you know a learner who is struggling to read polysyllable words? Try our new, download-and-print card games, called Syl-lab-it.

A free game, with the easiest words, is here, and the full set is here.

Elle Holloway, Spelfabet’s expert at turning work into fun, explains the game in this 6 minute video:

2-4 syllable words are printed on the cards, and players must read them as they’re played. Smaller-print versions of each word have syllables circled and stressed syllables shaded. Sometimes, syllable circles overlap, as there’s often more than one way to break a word up (e.g. by sound or word structure. Skilled readers think about both), and coarticulation happens between syllables, not just within them.

The circles and shading make it easy to show learners that a syllable can be represented by a vowel letter alone, or a vowel letter/spelling plus one or more consonants. This is useful when teaching learners to read one syllable at a time, and adjust word stress.

There are five types of cards, three of which are used on your own turn (attack, steal, heal) and two of which are used to spoil your opponent’s turn (deflect, overpower). This game is for two players who each start with five cards and ten tokens (counters, coins, whatever). Play continues until someone loses all their tokens, and thus the game.

The free sample game targets words with simple syllables and spelling patterns, such as on the cards depicted above. The other 12 games target the following syllable structures and sound-spelling relationships:

1. CVCC and CCVC syllables, e.g. ‘suspect’, ‘umbrella’ and ‘experiment’,
2. Three adjacent consonants (CCC) like ‘splendid’, ‘nondescript’ and ‘unrestricted’,
3. Consonant digraphs like ‘jacket’, ‘marathon’ and ‘establishment’,
4. Very common suffixes like ‘risky’, ‘talented’ and ‘abandoning’,
5. VCe (‘split vowel’) syllable endings like ‘suppose’, ‘hesitate’ and ‘misfortune’.
6. The sound /ae/ as in ‘betray’, ‘repainted’ and ‘complicated’,
7. The sound /ee/ as in ‘medium’, ‘easily’ and ‘convenient’,
8. The sound /oe/ as in ‘shadow’, ‘nobody’ and ‘overloaded’,
9. The sound /er/ as in ‘hurting’, ‘thirstily’ and ‘personally’,
10. The sound /ou/ as in ‘without’, ‘astounding’ and ‘powerhouses’
11. The sound /ie/ as in ‘direct’, ‘justify’ and ‘insightful’,
12. The sound /oo/ as in ‘cartoon’, ‘screwdriver’ and ‘absolutely’.

There’s a choice of single or double-sided card version of each game, the latter in case your Syl-lab-it decks might get jumbled. Print each game on 3 sheets of A4 light card or paper (at ~110% if your printer can manage narrow margins), laminate and cut up into cards. Sorry we can’t do that for you, but we timed it and each deck takes about 10 minutes to cut up neatly with scissors, and less with a guillotine.

We hope your learners enjoy the games, and learn to read polysyllable words confidently and well.

7-11 April holiday phonics groups

Do you know a Melbourne* child in their first three years of schooling who needs a phonemic awareness and phonics boost?

During school holidays, the Speech Pathologists at Spelfabet in North Fitzroy run intensive explicit, systematic synthetic phonics therapy groups for children in their first three years of schooling needing extra help with learning to read and spell.

Each group runs for an hour a day for a week, plus daily homework activities. We provide all necessary resources, including sets of quality decodable readers. Children are carefully matched, with a maximum ratio of four children per Speech Pathologist, allowing for a high-intensity session.

The groups run at a fast pace with a mix of activities, and include plenty of games, fun and opportunities to make friends. On 7-11 April 2025, children will practise building, spelling and reading:

• VC and CVC words like ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘hop’, ‘bus’, ‘jet’, ‘fan’ and ‘zip’. Starting time: 8am.

• CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC, CCCVC and CVCCC words like ‘help’, ‘drop’, ‘crust’, ‘stamp’ and ‘bends’. Starting time: 10am.

• Words containing consonant digraphs like ‘fresh’, ‘champ’, ‘thing’, ‘quack’, and ‘when’. Starting time: 1.30pm.

Children not already on our caseload need to attend a short screening session before the end of term to check if our groups would suit them, and if so, which one. Please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au, call (03) 8528 0138 to book in, or see www.spelfabet.com.au/groups for more information.

^{* For overseas readers, we’re in an inner northern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.}

Ten cheers for our new Children’s Laureate!

I was so excited to be invited to the launch of Sally Rippin’s two year program as Australian Children’s Laureate on Tuesday, though surprised to spot a former colleague in the crowd who was once staunchly anti-phonics and pro Reading Recovery/Fountas and Pinnell.

Then I realised: Sally is the Perzackly Perfect Person to cheer people off the sinking Balanced Literacy ship (especially since the Grattan Institute’s Reading Guarantee report), and onto ship Structured Literacy, so all kids can hurry up and start enjoying wonderful stories.

Sally isn’t just an author of great kids’ books, she’s the mum of a neurodivergent kid who struggled to read and spell, and a staunch advocate of making sure all kids are taught to crack our spelling code, instead of being encouraged to memorise and guess words. Her book for adults about this, Wild Things: how we learn to read, and what can happen if we don’t, should be in every school and local library. Here she is at the launch with queen of our activist dyslexia mums, Dyslexia Victoria Support founder Heidi Gregory.

Sally’s term as Children’s Laureate is the perfect time for a strong push to dump dross like predictable/repetitive texts and rote-memorisation of high frequency word lists, and promote things like decodable texts and systematic, explicit phonics teaching in Years F-2. It’s also the perfect time to improve early identification and intervention for neurodivergent kids in schools, and knock down barriers to reading for all kids.

The Grattan Institute report (there’s a podcast about it here, and a 20-minute YouTube summary here) says kids with poor literacy currently in school could cost taxpayers $40 billion over their lifetimes, not to mention the personal cost to those kids. I cannot think of a better use of my taxes than ensuring all schools use literacy-teaching methods that are based on the best available evidence, and that struggling and neurodiverse kids whose parents can’t afford high-quality private intervention don’t miss out on it.

At the launch I also got a copy of Come Over To My House, a picture book co-authored by Eliza Hull, full of stories about making the world more accessible for everyone. It’s perfect for our waiting room. I also got some School Of Monsters compilations for our lending library, signed by Sally and illustrator Chris Kennett (who also drew little bats on them). Chris taught everyone at the launch how to draw a monster, which was rather hilarious.

Sally will be travelling all over Australia in the next two years, so make sure you find out when she is coming to a town or city near you (the ACLF newsletter and social media information is here), and spread the word. It’s a story well worth telling.

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.

Embedded Picture Mnemonic picture files

Since devising the Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonics, illustrator Cat Macinnes and I have received many requests for products containing them: bookmarks, placemats, friezes, flip charts, cards and posters of different sizes, slideshows, you name it. They’ll even make an appearance on The US Reading League’s Reading Buddies TV show at some stage. The Science of Reading community is a creative one.

Sadly, we don’t have capacity to print, store and mail out lots of hard copy resources containing our mnemonics. If you know of an interested publisher, we’d love to hear from them! Even designing and producing all the downloadable resources people have suggested would be a full-time job for quite a while. We aren’t designers, and already have full-time jobs.

We’re therefore making high-resolution versions of the picture files (.png files, for both PC and Apple) available for people to download and use in creating resources for their own students/caseloads/children. This should make it easy to organise them into any phonics teaching sequence, and print customised materials for any group of beginning readers. Click here to download a zipped folder of the whole set.

Over time, we’ve created alternate versions of some mnemonics, thanks to feedback from purchasers, and in an effort to cater to a surprisingly large audience. Our original ‘e/egg’, ‘o/orange’ and ‘u/undies’ mnemonics were OK for Australian English, but ‘e/echo’, ‘o/octopus and ‘u/up’ were needed for speakers of US English. Recently we’ve discovered that some people aren’t keen on ‘y/yoga’, so we’ve added this nice y/yawn mnemonic to the set.

The zipped folder of picture files includes all the mnemonics we’ve produced to date (except the ‘th/path’ and ‘th/weather’ ones, which weren’t a hit), so when there’s a choice, please use the one that suits you best. In parts of rural Australia where doors aren’t often locked, k/kangaroo is probably a better choice than ‘k/key’. On a surf-mad coast ‘ur/surf’ might make more sense than ‘ur/burn’. In the US, ‘air/hair’ and ‘ear/gears’ aren’t needed, but ‘aw/claw’ is, and ‘wh/whale’ might be (in places where ‘witch’ and ‘which’ aren’t homophones).

When you introduce ‘long’ vowels, you might like to make little strips for student desks like this…

…or a strip like this might suit your students/teaching sequence better:

Hooray, everyone will be able to tailor the set to their accent/sequence/needs, including people who speak Englishes other than Australian, British and American. Cat already put time and talent into drawing all the mnemonics, so you might as well use whichever suit you best (yes, we prefer ‘u/undies’, and people keep asking us to bring it back, ha ha).

Artists should be paid properly for their work, so please respect Cat’s copyright and abide by the terms of use included in the pack. Pricing is based on the assumption that each teacher/therapist/parent who buys the files will use them as they see fit with their class/caseload/family members, and not share them with other professionals or use them for commercial purposes. It’s OK for parents to share printouts with little cousins or the kid next door, but if a school with five Early Years teachers wants to use them in a range of resources across five Early Years classrooms, the school should buy five copies.

The picture files are in .png format, which is the best format for storing high-resolution artwork. They are in a zipped folder which looks like this in the Downloads area of the Spelfabet shop:

Download it to your computer, and you’ll be able to unzip it and access the files, and save them somewhere easy to find and use. Don’t panic if you double-click on a file and it opens in your default picture program and looks a bit weird. The pictures should look as you expect when you drop them into documents. Please reduce picture file size first if they’re too big for your purposes, so the resources you make from them don’t take up lots of space on your computer or take ages to print out. Like adding salt when cooking, it’s easy to make files smaller and lower-resolution, but not reverse the process.

As reading researchers might have predicted, lots of people have told us they’ve been surprised how quickly children have learnt sound-letter relationships using the Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonics. We hope that’s true of any young beginners you try them with, and that you find them quick and easy to turn into great, affordable resources that suit your accent, location and teaching sequence.

Click here to get the whole set.