Spelfabet

Oz Phonics 3

There's a new Oz Phonics app out, and the nice chap who made it sent me a code so I could download it and check it out (thanks, Steve!), and save breaking the bank on the $2.99 purchase price.

In the course of emailing Steve my feedback on Oz Phonics 3, I discovered something embarrassing.

I've only been using half the previous two apps, Oz Phonics 1 and 2.

I didn't notice they had a little scroll thing next to the menu.

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Milo’s read and grab word game

In the last couple of days I’ve been using a great little card-stealing game with groups of Grade 1 and 2 students, who have consistently squealed with delight as they stole each other’s cards, called it “the funnest”, and wanted to keep playing it long after I was ready to do something else.

So I think it’s time for a blog post about this nifty little game.

Maureen Pollard from Little Learners Love Literacy made it up and publishes it, and gave the simplest version of it to me when we went out for a drink a few weeks ago (thanks Maureen!) to share ideas about how to get schools to take up synthetic phonics, and commiserate with each other about how difficult it is.

I got my groups to play it a couple of weeks ago, thought it was great, lent it to one of their teachers, and then the following week found the kids were asking, “Can we play the stealing game?”, and being unimpressed that I didn’t have it.

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Phonics Hero Classroom

Last week I recommended the free Phonics Hero app* for the iPad to a colleague, but the next day she told me, to my dismay, that it was no longer available in the Australian apps store.

Oh no! It was one of my very, very favourite apps for children aged 4-7 (and even little older) who were still learning the absolute basics about letters and sounds.

I was working with a 5-year-old with an Autism Spectrum Disorder just the other day, and he got a terrible case of the whiny-I-don’t-want-to’s at every literacy activity I presented to him, except this one, which he wanted to keep doing, till I had to ask him to stop.

Don’t panic, there’s a new, even better version

I checked the Apps store this evening myself, and calloo, callay, there is a new version, called Phonics Hero Classroom. It’s still free, and if anything it looks even better than its predecessor.*

It has simple graphics and activities, crisp sounds, funny rewards, helpful hints, and a well-organised teaching sequence, all in a young-child-friendly game format with an escape narrative.

There are bubbles to pop, flies to swat, laughing ghosts, treasure chests, ladybirds to colour in, an ice-cream-eating giraffe, a brick-smashing troll, a brewing witch and lambs to spray-paint (apologies to the RSPCA).

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Long vowel games

I’ve just put a new set of six games in the Spelfabet shop.

These games practise “long” vowel spellings in words with between two and five sounds. The spellings targeted are:

• a…e as in name, face, gate,
• ee and ea, as in beet/beet, cheep/cheap, greet/great,
• i…e as in time, nice, slide,
• o…e as in nose, home, stole,
• oo as in good, look, wood and moon, brood, spoon,
• u…e as in tune, huge and prune.

They are $AUD5.00 each, and here’s a video of what they look like, and how to play them.

Victorian Modern Cursive font versions of these games are also available from the Spelfabet shop.

Literacy games

Today’s blog post is a little video rant about how hard it is to find high-quality spelling/word-building games in mainstream toy and game shops.

They rarely go much beyond one sound for each of 26 letters, and their designers often seem to know very little about English word structure, any of the dozens of more complex spelling patterns, or how beginners learn. Why they don’t ask a Speech Pathologist or Applied Linguist or teacher with good phonics knowledge for help is quite beyond me.

I often go into mainstream toy shops, department stores and other places selling kids’ games, looking for new spelling activities, but come out empty-handed.

Most of the offer is “A is for aeroplane, B is for bumblebee, X is for xylophone” type garbage, and most things that look more promising usually mix up easy and hard spellings, and contain information that’s just plain phonetically inaccurate. So I put them back on the shelf and walk out, and I hope you do too. I’d rather make my own, or order something higher-quality online, than expose my learners to confusing and inaccurate materials.

I still have a couple of mainstream commercial beginners’ word-building games in my cupboard, but let’s have a look at them on YouTube:

I might just throw both these games in the recycling, and free up some cupboard space for something more useful.

Spelling games – final consonant blends

I’ve just added two new, simple four-sound word-building games to this website’s shop.

They each take 12 minutes to print and assemble (I just timed myself) and cost $5.

These games allow learners to practise blending consonant sounds at word endings.

One of them practises building words with “-ed” endings like “packed”, “hummed” and “missed”.

The other practises a range of other final consonant combinations.

Unlike many commercially-available spelling games, they are based on synthetic phonics principles, and contain strong, clear patterns and accurate information about sound-letter relationships.

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Free spelling game

To celebrate my local school holidays, here’s a simple spelling game for 2-6 players, which you can download for free from this website’s shop.

It is also available in Victorian Modern Cursive script.

Preparation

Once you’ve downloaded it, simply print two A4 pages of cards (the coloured ones on white paper, or the black-and-white ones on coloured paper), laminate them (for durability), and cut them up into 36 cards.

How to play

Deal out the cards, build a word with two cards (a consonant and a vowel, e.g. ch + ew to make “chew”), then take turns creating a new word by putting a new, same-coloured card on top of one of the existing cards (e.g. put “n” on top of “ch” to make “new”).

The winner is the person who gets rid of all their cards first, or whoever has the fewest cards once nobody can make any more words.

The 4 minute video below demonstrates the game, and the download includes an instructions page, if anything’s not clear.

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