Description

The new, download-and-print Spelfabet moveable alphabets are designed to help you show learners how to take words apart into sounds (phonemes), spelling patterns (graphemes) and word parts (morphemes), put them back together again, and understand how sounds relate to letters.

It has a new n/noodles mnemonic that looks like Asian noodles (not pasta!), and three 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 as double-sided so they can be flipped to show spelling variations (use double-sided magnets, or print on magnetic paper – one Aussie supplier is here – and stack duplicate/related tiles). The set comes with 55 A4 pages of sound swaps/word chains to make, and inflectional morphemes plus suffix -y (boss-bossy) and agent noun -er (swim-swimmer) are introduced early. It contains:

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 should be flipped over to show just the letter and (an) example word(s) illustrating how it is pronounced:

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

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

Learners need to know that the 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 there are sound swaps which switch between ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels by changing word-final spellings. There are also single consonant tiles with doubled consonants on the flip side e.g ‘t’ with ‘tt’ on the flip side. This makes it easy to show that ‘cut’ gains an extra ‘t’ letter (but not an extra sound) when a vowel suffix changes it to ‘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 now includes all the high-utility affixes identified in this Lane et al (2019) research. There are little chameleons on assimilated prefixes to signal that their last sound and/or letter often changes to better match what follows them (e.g. in + mature = immature, con + relate = correlate). Colour coding lets you help kids narrow down their visual search for the right 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. 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. Otherwise, assemble them with magnets and display them in groups on a whiteboard, something like this, with duplicate tiles stacked to reduce visual clutter:

You only need to download and print the version of this product 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 would like a version created for the English you speak (NZ? Canada? India? elsewhere?), let us know what it is and what you suggest adding/changing/removing.