Printable phonics sound cards

The word under each letter is a reminder rather than something to decode, and it is the word the sound table itself keeps — “cat” sits under the “a” and “box” under the “x” — so it is not always a word the letter starts, and one word can turn up under two cards. A child three days into phonics cannot read “fan”, and is not being asked to: it is there so that whoever is holding the card can say the sound rather than the letter name, which is the single commonest thing to get wrong when teaching this at home. The letter says /f/; it is called “eff”; the card is about the first of those.

Cards for the digraphs are one setting away rather than on this page. Tick “sh”, “ch” and “th” in the builder and they join the pack — and “th” arrives as two cards, because the sound at the front of “thin” and the sound at the front of “this” are two different things a child has to learn separately, however identical they look on paper.

Every sheet in this section is built from a list of spellings rather than from a word list, and that is the whole of how it works: the page above uses the sounds named on it and no others, so nothing on it can ask a child to read something they have not been taught. The list is a setting. Open the sheet in the builder, tick the sounds your own child has covered, and the page rebuilds around them — which is also why there is no level, no stage and no lesson number anywhere here. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next week.

This page is one sheet out of a family that prints seven: cards to cut out, a chart for the wall, words cut into their sounds, word families, a spelling matched to a word it is in, dictation lines, and sentences on strips. The sounds are the same tick list on all seven, so a week’s worth of sheets comes out of one list ticked once.

Three marking conventions are switches beside it, each on its own: a bar over a vowel that says its own name, silent letters printed faintly, and two letters joined where they make one sound. They are shared across many phonics traditions rather than belonging to any one of them, which is exactly why they are switches here and not a named style.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

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. Word Jungle then reads the same lists aloud, which is the one thing paper cannot do — and the record book keeps track of which words a child keeps missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.