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John Walker, co-creator of the Sounds Write program, has a free course on Udemy for parents wishing to learn how to support their children’s reading and spelling journey at home.

Although he mentions the course was designed to support children aged 4-6, the same principles can be applied in the intervention setting with older students.

Watch the videos to gain insight into the activities and strategies used in the Sounds Write program.

John Walker | Sounds-Write literacy| Udemy John Walker is a Udemy instructor with educational courses available for enrollment. Check out the latest courses taught by John Walker

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Many of my clients have been working on the ch spellings (ch/tch). They are all doing a fantastic job 🌟. Here’s an online game activity for extra practice 😊

ch tch word sort Group sort - Drag and drop each item into its correct group.

In this blog post, phonemes (speech sounds) are explained by way of analogy. When learning to spell, children must be able to recognise all the sounds that make up a word. They must segment a word into its sound parts. Eg spell = s-p-e-l (4 sounds, spelt with 5 letters). Once they can do this confidently, they are then able to learn the different ways to spell the same sound. Eg /s/ spelt city, fence, scent, listen, miss.

“Getting children to say words slowly, listen to the sounds, and feel what’s happening in their mouths while writing/reading the relevant spellings is the teaching equivalent of bringing speech sounds up close enough to lick them in the face. It makes them hard to miss.” (Alison Clarke, Spelfabet)

A phoneme is like a dog Some of my best-received blog posts have included analogies to (try to) explain complex ideas. So let’s try another one. A phoneme is like a dog. We start developing a concept of what a dog i…