Spelfabet

Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts

It’s a little hard to scan through all the playing cards in the Spelfabet shop, so this page aims to help you see how they’re set up, find the deck(s) you want and get the best value for your money.

All our playing cards are downloadable, printable, and child-sized (5 X 6.5cm). The words on them are based on a sound-to-print, synthetic/linguistic phonics teaching approach. There are free sample decks, so you can try some out at no cost.

In the tables below, “V” means vowel sound, “C” means consonant sound, and only the top rows of each table are visible until you select  “show 25 entries” on their drop-down menus.

Basic/initial code

The first 18 decks cost AUD$20 if bought as a set, and cover the simplest spellings in English, starting with VC and CVC words, increasing to CCCVCC and CCVCCC, and then introducing six consonant digraphs.

Extended code 1

The next 15 decks cost AUD$16.67 if bought as a set (the same per-deck price as the first set), and mostly introduce one vowel spelling per deck. There are two combined decks, and three decks which contrast “short” and “long” vowels with split spellings (“cap/cape”, “win/wine”, “hop/hope”, etc).

Extended code 2

The next 12 decks cost AUD$13.33 if bought as a set, and first introduce final “le” and “ing” syllables and doubled consonants, then review consonant digraphs, then introduce seven new vowel spellings, each with two to five spellings.

The teaching sequence here fairly closely matches the one in the Alba/Totem books.

Extended code 3

The next 12 decks cost AUD$13.33 if bought as a set, and revise spellings from the previous sets while adding extra spellings, and mixing them into a deck of high-frequency words.

The teaching sequence here fairly closely matches the one in the Rescue/Talisman 1/Island Adventure books.

Advanced code 1

These 12 decks cost AUD$13.33 if bought as a set, and introduce a new vowel sound and extra spellings for two “short” vowels. There are then four decks focussed on consonant sounds with multiple spellings, then four decks of words built with Latin suffixes, and a deck of homographs.

The teaching sequence here fairly closely matches the one in the Titan’s Gauntlets/Talisman 2 books.

Extra decks

These 12 decks cost AUD$13.33 if bought as a set, and cover  compound words, “soft” C and G, additional spellings of “short” vowel sounds  and additional consonant sounds with multiple spellings.