91 pages of synthetic phonics activities designed for learners of any age who can write three-sound words and need structured, fine-grained, explicit, phonetically accurate, errorless learning, and extra practice developing correct and automatic letter formation when writing words with four to seven sounds. View the workbook’s video tour here. Download a free sample of the workbook here.

This workbook contains very straightforward activities that follow the same cycles, so you don’t need special training or expertise to help a learner use it. It walks you through the task of writing words with four or more sounds systematically, at first helping your learner develop phonemic awareness (segmenting skills) by discriminating and writing:

• Last sounds, then
• Middle sounds (vowels), then
• The inside consonants of blends, and finally
• Whole words.

It recycles the sounds and spellings from Workbook 1 (5 “short” vowels and one, two or three spellings of each of 23 consonants), and adds the following concepts/spellings:

• Regular plural “s”
• cks as in tacks
• x as in tax
• a as in grass
• k as in desk
• n as in bank
• ed as in filled (sounds like “d”)
• ed as in fished (sounds like “t”)
• ed as in pinned, mopped (following a doubled consonant)
• irregular past as in swam, crept, dug
• ed as in patted (new syllable)
• qu as in quit
• CVCCC, CCVCC and CCVCCC words as in jumps, cracks, squint
• a as in want
• possessive “s”
• u as in put, oo as in good
• a as in tall.

All activities incorporate pictures, to add meaning and build vocabulary. Pictures are mostly simple, computer-generated line drawings from the Mayer-Johnson Picture Communication Symbols, and are used with permission. They are suitable for all ages.

This workbook should be used in conjunction with other synthetic phonics activities at the same skill level, such as the games on this website, the movable alphabet, decodable books and relevant apps/software. To make good progress, your learner should do three to five practice sessions a week, ideally completing one or two sets of workbook words at a time, then do some reading, games, wordbuilding etc. at the same level.

Please note that this workbook is supplied as a pdf file which you download and print yourself. This keeps it affordable. Please print on scrap paper if you can, to save trees. You can purchase using a credit card, you don’t need a PayPal account.

The workbook comes with a cheat sheet listing all the words in the workbook and suggested sentences for each, so you don’t have to figure out what the target words are, and can work quickly. The aim is that your learner has lots of practice listening to spoken words, saying them in a stretched-out way, discriminating their sounds, matching the sounds to the correct letters/spellings, and writing them with correct placement and formation.

You may make up to fifty copies of this workbook, for use with your own students/clients. You might consider it most suitable as a simple, hard-to-get-wrong homework activity, and just check it each week/session.

* V = vowel sound, C = consonant sound.