The Print ShopPhonics
Printable phonics worksheets
7 sheets built from the sounds a child has actually been taught: cards to cut out, a chart for the wall, words cut into their sounds, word families, dictation lines and sentences with nothing untaught in them.
Free · answer keys · no download
On the shelf now
Each of these is a page that is itself the worksheet — open it, press print, and that is the whole of it. The four that withhold an answer print their key on the page behind.
The sounds themselves
Cards to cut out, and a chart of what has been covered so far.
- Sound cards — One card for each letter of the alphabet, with the sound it makes and a word it is in, laid out to cut apart along the dashed guides.
- “Sounds we know” wall chart — Every sound covered so far on one page for the wall — the alphabet and the consonant digraphs, each with a word it is in.
Reading and writing with them
Blending, word families, finding a spelling in a word, dictation, and sentences with nothing untaught in them.
- CVC words — say it slowly — Twenty short words printed as the sounds they are made of, with a line to write the whole word on — and the answer key on the page behind.
- Onset and rime — Twenty spelling sums — a beginning added to an ending, with the word they make written on the line, and the key on the page behind. The endings come from the spellings you have ticked.
- Match the sound to the word — Ten spellings down one side and ten words down the other, to join with a pencil — and the key behind, with the lines drawn in.
- Dictation — Twenty numbered lines and nothing to read — the words are on the answer key, for whoever is reading them out.
- Decodable sentences — Eight sentences printed large on strips to cut apart, with nothing in them a child has not been taught to read.
Built from your sounds, not from a level
The one thing a phonics worksheet has to know is where a child has got to. Everything on this shelf asks that and nothing else.
A child who has been taught c, a, t andh can read “cat” and cannot read “chat”. That is the whole mechanism behind every systematic phonics program there is, and it is the reason a worksheet full of words a child has not been shown how to work out does harm rather than nothing: it teaches them that reading is guessing.
So the sheets here are generated from a list of spellings you tick. Tick sh and words with sh in them appear; leave it and they never do. The same list builds all seven sheets, so a week’s practice comes out of one list ticked once — and the sheet you make carries the sounds inside it, so the link to it opens on the same list for anybody you send it to, with nothing uploaded and nothing to sign into.
There are no levels, no stages and no lesson numbers anywhere in this section, and that is deliberate rather than a gap. Numbering the lessons would mean copying somebody’s course, and naming a stage would mean pretending there is one course when the whole point is that every program orders the sounds differently. Whatever scheme you are using — a boxed curriculum, a school’s own, or a book from the library — the answer to “where are you up to” is a list of sounds, and that is what these sheets take.
Three typographic switches sit beside the list: a bar over a vowel that says its own name, silent letters printed faintly, and two letters joined where they make one sound. Each is on its own, because each is a convention many traditions share — and no combination of them ships here under anybody’s name.
And the words once they are known
Phonics is how a word is worked out; spelling is what happens once it no longer has to be. The shelf next door prints this week’s list in five shapes, the first sight words to trace and find, and ten pages on how words work — rhyme, syllables, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms.
The rest of the Print Shop
Ten shelves and ten school years, over the same sheets. A shelf is what a sheet is; a year is who it was drawn for, which every sheet states on its own page.
By subject
By grade
Your child’s name is not in the file
The Name: line is printed blank and filled in with a pencil. The sounds you tick are kept in your own browser and are never uploaded, no account is needed to print anything, and a sheet you send to another family carries the settings you chose and nothing else — see what we don’t collect.