Beginning and struggling readers and spellers need to learn how to pull words apart into sounds, and represent them with letters/spellings, and blend sounds together into words.
The sounds part of this task (phonemic awareness) is difficult for many, and English spelling is famously complex, as meaningful word parts (morphemes) also affect spelling. This website aims to help you teach beginners and strugglers about sounds and spellings using explicit, systematic synthetic phonics and knowledge of morphology, giving them a solid foundation on which to build their fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression.
The Spelfabet materials were designed by an Australian Speech Pathologist for non-experts to use in teaching struggling spellers/readers how to sound out words. They are carefully-sequenced, easy-to-use, affordable, downloadable and reproducible resources, which should be used with decodable books. They are supplementary resources, not a complete program.
This site includes resource lists to help you find good resources for teaching encoding and decoding skills, many of which also target vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, plus:
- Free resources
- Blog: Reviews of resources and teaching strategies, plain English discussions of theoretical stuff, and the occasional reflection or rant on teaching spelling and reading.
- Video tours of Spelfabet materials: workbooks, games, moveable alphabet.
- Spelling lists: Find free, carefully sequenced spelling lists, the many ways each English speech sound is spelt, and the main sounds represented by each spelling pattern.
- Therapy service: We offer individual and group intervention in North Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia, targeting phonemic awareness, orthographic and morphological knowledge and other language-based aspects of reading and writing. Tiana, who makes our appointments, works 10am to 6pm Monday to Thursday, phone: (03) 8528 0138 or email admin@spelfabet.com.au.
Spelfabet is also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Spelfabet acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work. We pay our respects to the Wurundjeri Elders, past and present, and extend this respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait people from other communities, and seek to help close the appalling literacy gap between indigenous and other Australians.
The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
