Awareness of sounds in words (phonemic awareness) and spelling pattern knowledge (phonics) are essential for good reading and spelling. Many learners aren't getting the teaching they need in these two areas.
This website aims to help you teach these skills fast and well, so they support other vital literacy skills like fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
This site includes resource lists to make it easier for you to find high-quality resources, many of which are part of synthetic phonics programs.
The Spelfabet teaching materials available from this website are carefully-sequenced, easy-to-use, affordable, downloadable and reproducible, and were designed by an Australian Speech Pathologist for slow-progress readers and spellers, including learners with language difficulties.
These materials aim to help you teach blending, segmenting, phoneme manipulation and spelling patterns in tiny, fast steps. They're most suitable for older learners (aged 7 and over) with shaky confidence, who need lots of practice and success. You don't need special expertise or hours of training to use them.
This website includes:
- Video tours of Spelfabet materials: workbooks, games, movable alphabet.
- Freebies: Download free workbook sample pages, picture books, spelling lookup booklet and/or a wordbuilding game.
- Spelling tests: Not sure where to start? Try these video spelling tests.
- Spelling lists: Find free, carefully sequenced spelling lists targeting one new spelling at a time, the many ways each English speech sound is spelt, and the main sounds represented by each spelling pattern.
- Blog: Reviews of resources and teaching strategies, plain English versions of professional/academic information, and the occasional rant or reflection on the way early literacy is taught.
- Consulting: Assessments and goal-setting and programming for struggling readers/spellers, and workshops for schools.