Spelfabet

Hope to see you at the Language, Learning and Literacy conference

I’m taking the whole Spelfabet team to Perth for the Language, Literacy and Learning conference next month (Thursday 7th to Saturday 9th May). We’re really looking forward to it.

Online learning is good, but you can’t beat getting right away to learn and catch up with colleagues at a world-class, in-person conference.

I’ve only managed to attend this conference in person once (COVID & family stuff got in the way) and it was brilliant. I wrote blog posts about it here and here. Profs Stanislas Dehaene and Kathy Rastle are among this year’s international keynote speakers again.

I think I’d cross the Nullarbor again just to hear from them, and maybe ask them a burning follow-up question or two during a meal break (and maybe embarrass myself asking for a selfie).

My wonderful gamify-everything colleague, Elle Holloway and I will present a workshop called “It’s all about the reps”, about high-repetition games we use in phonics and morphology intervention. We’re also proud to be a sponsor of the conference, and madly prepping new games and updated phonics playing cards for the trade exhibition. We’re going to donate some of our resources to the conference prize draw.

The venue will be the splendid Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle (try their virtual tour here). Other international speakers are Prof Stuart Kime from Evidence-Based Education in the UK, Dr Zach Groshell of the Education Rickshaw in the US, children’s mental health expert Tara Thiagarajan from Sapien Labs in the US, and maths expert Kristopher Boulton from Unstoppable Learning in the UK.

A total of 60 sessions will be presented by a multitude of experts. It took us quite a while to decide who’d sign up for which session. Too many interesting options. A good problem to have.

You can learn more and register here: www.dsfconference.net.au, and their socials are:

• Facebook: @dyslexiaspeld
• LinkedIn: @dsf-literacy-and-clinical-services
• X: @DyslexiaSPELD

P.S. I realise this blog post sounds a bit like an ad for the conference, sorry. I’ve just become President of SPELD-Vic, sister organisation of DSF, the conference organisers. Their CEO, Mandy Nayton, has put in a colossal effort moonlighting as volunteer SPELD-Vic CEO, and provided heaps of DSF staff time and expertise to SPELD-Vic, to pull it out of a bit of a slump. I want their conference to be a huge success for that reason as well as because we’re all going, and I’m pretty sure it will be.

Hope to see you there!

Alison Clarke

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.}

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.

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.
 

Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover

Many mainstream educational publishers have recently started marketing decodable books, to meet fast-growing demand for phonics practice texts. Having bought and examined hundreds of these books, I’m excited by how many good options are now available. Here are photos of books we have at the Spelfabet office:

In general, publishers who produced decodables before there was a lucrative market for them tend to offer better phonics practice/lesson-to-text matching than less experienced publishers. However, all major publishers now seem to recognise that kids need to be taught to decode words, not guess and memorise them.

One problem with the term ‘decodable’ is that a book containing lots of sentences like “A dog is in the mud” and “Tim did not sit the dog in the tub” can be decoded by many young learners, but may not offer much practice of the book’s stated phonics targets. Just as an example, the new Flying Start to Literacy Decodables Unit 3 states its phonics targets as ‘b’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘x’ and ‘y’. The letter ‘j’ appears in three of the ten books (in a total of four words, as ‘job’ appears twice), ‘v’ appears in only two words (‘van’ once and ‘vet’ eight times), and ‘q’ doesn’t appear in any words at all.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodable text including low-frequency targets – there simply aren’t a lot of CVC words containing ‘j’ and ‘v’. I’d still argue that more words like ‘jam’, ‘jab’, ‘jog’, ‘jet’, ‘jig’, ‘jot’, ‘jut’, ‘Jed’, ‘Jan’, and/or ‘vat’ and perhaps some clipped words like ‘vac’, ‘Ev’, ‘Viv’, ‘Bev’ or ‘Kev’ would have improved a book targeting ‘j’ and ‘v’. I don’t know why ‘q’ is listed as a target.

Busy teachers should be able to judge a book by its cover, and not have to check whether the targets listed on books’ covers are in multiple words in the books.

I also wondered about similarities between some of the new Flying Start decodables and existing books from the same publisher. Here’s a photo of six of the covers of Unit 6 Flying Start to Literacy decodables:

Here are covers of other texts from the same publisher. The pictures on them appear in the above decodables.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodables, let alone write them to match illustrations from an existing book. ‘Dad’ in the new decodable ‘At Our Farm’ looks quite old to have such a young son (yes, I know Charlie Chaplin’s youngest child was born when he was 73). Being an Australian dairy farmer’s daughter, I wondered about the dairy, calf shed and hay shed all being called ‘barns’, not a term I’ve known Aussie farmers to use. Real farmers’ kids will also scratch their heads at a photo of the ‘farmer’s son’ offering grain to a calf that looks far too young to consume anything but milk.

Please check out decodables before you spend a lot of money on them. Read a few from each level, and consider how well they match your phonics teaching sequence. Think about whether they make sense, and offer value for money. A single book can cost anywhere between $2.70 (yay the Pocket Rockets by Berys from Moonee Ponds!) and about $13. If getting printables, don’t forget to include printing and collating materials and time in your cost calculations. Consider whether relevant training and other matching teaching resources are available, their cost and quality.

The last of the 2024 Spelfabet decodable book workshops aren’t going ahead due to caseload pressures and low enrolments, but if you want a tailored session to help you choose books for a specific person or purpose, please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au.