Phonics International

Spelling Sheets

There are 40 new Spelling Sheets ready to be uploaded into units (modules) 1 to 6. The first example of these sheets is already available to see in the free unit 1. Please tell your friends and colleagues about yet another free resource in unit 1.

A Spelling Sheets Word List is included in each unit and suggestions for how to use these activity sheets in differentiated ways.

The Spelling Sheets can be a paper-based activity or can be used in conjunction with the Grapheme Tiles(available in all units), magnetic letters or CanDoCubes (see www.candocubes.com for a complementary kinaesthetic programme which I have designed for Can Do Education Ltd.)

MrH has such a long list of resources to upload at the moment that he says he can't 'keep up' with my production speed!

(And of course thanks to Arun, our illustrator who broke all speed-records recently! )

The Spelling Sheet strand for unit 6 has been added.

I wanted to mention this strand in particular as it includes 'split digraphs' (known as 'magic e' traditionally).

I had to make a decision about how to write sound-dashes in the Phonics International programme for split digraphs.

If you map from 'sound to print' for spelling, you would identify three sounds in a word such as 'bike'.

This would be three sound dashes _ _ _

When the sounds are mapped onto the letters, this would become
b i ke

Consequently, it looks like a split digraph actually gives us a word-end grapheme of 'ke'.

For reading there isn't a problem. The reader sees the word 'bike' and notes two single vowel letters wrapped around a single consonant letter and is ALERTED that the first vowel letter might be code for its long sound /igh/ in the case of 'bike'.

In terms of finger-tracking, the learner points under each recognisable grapheme from left to right of the printed word with his or her index finger - but then he or she uses the index finger and middle finger simultaneously to point under the split digraph letters 'i' and 'e' and says the long vowel sound /igh/ then finally ends by pointing under the letter 'k' with the index finger and says /k/.

I decided for spelling, however, to write longer sound dashes for the final 'e' of the split digraph to be able to tag along with the final consonant letter. Once teachers understand the way that I have modelled this, they simply have to explain this to the learners.