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.

PETAA’s Authentic Texts to Support Teaching Phonics

The Primary English Teaching Association of Australia has produced a new, downloadable list of Authentic Texts To Support Teaching Phonics, which:

“…maps examples of rich authentic texts to the Federal Government’s Literacy Hub phonics progression, which presents a structured sequence of letter–sound correspondences and phonics skills for development across Foundation to Year 2. This free download provides early years teachers around Australia with a quality text list for teacher read alouds that support the phonics instruction that they’ve done that day/week.”

The guide is a downloadable spreadsheet listing phonics targets and books to support them. Here’s a screenshot of how it starts:

I’m so happy that PETAA recognises ‘Systematic, direct and explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics is more likely to result in successful literacy outcomes’, so I was keen to see what kind of books they recommend to support this teaching. I popped into my local kids’ bookshop and bought three of the first six titles on their list.

PETAA recommends these books to support teaching of the the earliest sound-letter relationships in the Literacy Hub phonics teaching sequence, which I write as s/snake, a/apple, t/tiger, p/penguin, i/insect and n/noodles (AKA satpin, I use the reference words from our Embedded Picture Mnemonics, which help little kids remember sound-letter links). These are the first sound-letter relationships taught to five-year-olds in VC and CVC words (V=vowel, C=consonant) in this teaching sequence, and several others. Children are also taught four high-frequency words in this Phase: ‘is’, ‘a’, ‘I’ and ‘the’.

I did some word counts so I could figure out how many words a child taught these phonics and high-frequency word targets should be able to read in each of the three books I bought.

Hedgehog or Echidna?

• 573 total words
• 11 Decodable VC words (2 X ‘at’, 3 X ‘it’, and 6 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 57 pre-taught high-frequency words: 57 (14 X ‘is’, 19 X ‘a’, 12 X ‘I’, 12 X ‘the’).

Turbo Turtle

• 973 total words
• 31 decodable VC words (9 X ‘at’, 1 X ‘an’, 10 X ‘it’, 11 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 71 pre-taught high-frequency words (5 X ‘is’, 17 X ‘a’, 2 X “I”, 47 ‘the’).

Give me some Space!

• 1007 total words
• 47 decodable VC words (5 X ‘at’, 8 X ‘an’, 11 X ‘it’, 23 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 88 pre-taught high-frequency words (18 X ‘is’, 17 X ‘a’, 8 X “I”, 45 X ‘the’).

The only readable words in these books for the target beginners are prepositions, pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs, i.e. unstressed function words that glue sentences together, but don’t mean much on their own. Interrupting a rollicking story to allow children to read such words just seems tedious and confusing.

A young child focussing on a storybook’s print (which young kids are disinclined to do) and thinking about phonics, rather than looking at the pictures and listening to the story, will be able to see lots of letters ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘n’ in any book. But can they connect these letters to sounds in spoken words at story pace? When nobody is pointing to each word as it’s read? Srsly?

Stopping a good story to talk about phonics seems more likely to annoy children than help them, but anyway, let’s keep thinking about this. The PETAA list of Authentic texts to support teaching phonics includes example words which illustrate letter-sound relationships. Here’s a screenshot of the list for teaching about s/snake, a/apple, t/tiger, p/penguin, i/insect and n/noodles (in that order):

As you can see, the list includes s/scent, a/astronomical, a/gravity, a/intergalactic, t/turbo-charged, t/nectar, i/cylindrical, i/familiar, p/palomino, p/pinto, and n/nectar again. Interrupting a good story to talk about a letter-sound relationship in a probably-unfamiliar and/or polysyllabic word? Hmm. Not likely to win anyone Most Favoured Teacher Status.

You might have also noticed ‘a/astronauting’ on the list, which the Macquarie Dictionary says is not a real word. The list also suggests that a/after is pronounced like a/apple in Australian English (it’s not), that there’s a t/tiger sound in ‘clutched’* (there isn’t), and that we say/hear an i/insect sound in the second, unstressed syllables of ‘rabbit’ and ‘hermit’ (nope, it’s a schwa).

Teachers should read great storybooks aloud to little kids to boost their oral language skills and share knowledge and enjoyment.

They should give little kids decodable text so they can practise the skills taught in phonics lessons.

There’s no need to mix up these two very different types of books.

_{* If you’ve studied phonology, you’ll know that the sound /ch/ starts off as /t/ and is released as /sh/, so technically it does contain a /t/ sound, but that’s slicing it too finely for children. For them, ‘tch’ is just the main way we spell /ch/ after a ‘short’ or ‘checked’ vowel, as in batch, fetch, itch, scotch, hutch. You can see what the Macquarie Dictionary says about the pronunciation of ‘clutch’ at right.}

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 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.

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.
 

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.}

Holiday groups, new games, 30% off sale

A quick blog post about three things: therapy groups for Melbourne F-2 children in January 2025, 15 more Flex-It card games to teach Set for Variability/pronunciation correction in polysyllable words, and a bumper end of year Spelfabet online shop sale (use the code “Happy Holidays!” at the checkout for 30% off).

January therapy groups

We still have a few places in our 20-24th January therapy groups for young struggling readers/spellers (2024 Foundation to Year 2 children). If you know a young child in Melbourne whose school report says they’re not keeping up with peers on literacy, and who might like to join an intensive group, please let them know. More details are here.

We now have a bunch of kids who have been coming back most holidays, as young children are often too tired to do therapy outside school hours during term. Groups can be more fun than individual sessions, and allow children to make friends with peers who are also finding reading/spelling a bit tricky.

More Flex-It card games

A second tranche of 15 Flex-It card download-and-print games are now in the website shop, you can find them here. These games give children controlled practice trying a different target sound for a target spelling (Set for Variability/pronunciation correction), if their first attempt at sounding out a word isn’t successful, e.g. if they rhyme ‘very’ with ‘furry’ instead of ‘berry’.

Each printable game costs an Aussie dollar (or 70c for the rest of 2024) plus GST. Each prints in colour on three sheets of A4 cardboard. Print and laminate what you need, cut them up (or helpful older kids might like to flex their scissor skills) and you’re ready to play. The original 15 Flex-It games have also been improved slightly, so if you already have the first set, log back into the shop to download the new files (go to My Account, reset your password if it’s forgotten).

30% off everything in the Spelfabet shop

To congratulate everyone for getting through the year, we’re having a bumper 30% off everything sale in the Spelfabet online shop until the end of 2024.

Choose the things you want from the shop – embedded picture mnemonics, decodable books, games, quizzes, workbooks, whatever – then type “Happy Holidays!” into the coupon box at the checkout for the discount. If you dislike laminating and cutting up, we probably can’t post the printed Short Vowels game in the video below to you before Christmas, but postage on a class set costs the same as a single game, and would arrive anywhere in Australia before the 2025 school year (sorry we don’t mail them overseas).

May your festive season be full of rest, fun and love, from everyone at Spelfabet.