Had a great time at the Virginia Reading League Conference today! Hope we can do it again soon! @thereadingleagueva.bsky.social

Last night I gave a talk about how we can create our customizable games! Thanks to LearnUp Centers for hosting and publishing the recording. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRG...

We built a new toy. You can make any letter sequence you want and see what words you learn at each step. Come try it out! Show us your best (and worst) sequences for teaching letter sounds. phonicsandstuff.com/letter-seque...

Join us for a virtual event hosted by LearnUp Centers and Phonics & Stuff! I'll be talking about how to use the Phonics & Stuff tools to teach reading. I've broken down 30,000 words so you don't have to! Come learn how this fuels our free games and teaching tools. www.eventbrite.com/e/learnup-sp...

Explore interconnected morphemes as webs! Similar to a morpheme matrix, a morpheme web shows the variety of words that can be built with a morpheme base. We offer a handful of free ones, while members get access to over 5,000 morphemes! phonicsandstuff.com/morpheme-webs

I've had a great time the past several years. Looking forward to it again!

Sold a Story fans - we've got something new! www.youtube.com/shorts/a94It...

We have a new daily puzzle! It's a fun way to learn different morphemes, but really it's just an excuse to have another word puzzle for me to play. phonicsandstuff.com/puzzles/morp...

It's been a few years, but we finally have a real home page. Plus, a new mascot. Say hello to Nibbles!

We have something new I hope you guys will like! It's a daily morphology puzzle we're calling Morpheme Mix. Every day you'll get a collection of morphemes that you combine in different ways to make words. Let us know what you think! phonicsandstuff.com/puzzles/morp...

The subtraction worksheet is available now too! Create subtraction facts worksheets from 0 to 10 for students. phonicsandstuff.com/worksheets/m...

Addition Worksheet Creator Create addition facts worksheets from 0 to 10. Why does a phonics website have math worksheets? Because we do phonics AND stuff. The stuff includes math! phonicsandstuff.com/worksheets/m...

Anyone else going to be attending? planetwordmuseum.org/events/eyes-...

We finished re-formatting another Core Knowledge decodable. We love the high quality story and images, but think they work better when you put the stories and images on a single page. Enjoy! phonicsandstuff.com/decodables#r...

How often does the rule 'i before e' actually apply? In our database of 30k+ words, 'i before e' occurs 902 times compared to 'e before i', which occurs 226 times. However, if you look at weighted word frequencies (how often a word actually occurs in English), it's a more interesting story.

Can't wait for more of this!

We have a new worksheet! Create 'Fill In Vowels' worksheets with customized settings. phonicsandstuff.com/worksheets/p...

We just made a new fun tool! Teaching students how to write letters correctly is critical, so we made some simple animations for use in classrooms or at home. Come try it out and let us know what you think! phonicsandstuff.com/handwriting

'Niece' and 'nephew' aren't the original English words. They were borrowed from French and supplanted native 'nift' and 'neve', direct cognates of German 'Nichte' and 'Neffe'. The French words have the same Proto-Indo-European ancestors so they're cognates too, but very distant ones. Here's more:

On our site you can use Google to sign in now, so you don't have to remember another password. If you previously made an account, you can login with Google and it'll still have all your data. We also added a reminder for which you used to login, because I forget all the time on other sites.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to 'yeet' being in the dictionary than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Renew! Time for a new year!

Solstice! Completely missed posting this last week.

Here's a delightful discussion I had about our site and ways to make it better. I really like the community that's developing on Bluesky.

After a cosy Christmas fire, there are cinders in the fireplace, as well as ashes, which in French are called cendres. 'Cinder' and 'cendre' may look alike but they aren't etymologically related: they come from two unrelated words. However, 'cendre' did influence the spelling of 'cinder'. More:

I see academics complaining that schools are ignoring results of their research, but it might be easier if reading the papers themselves wasn't so difficult. (I almost said arduous, but Flesch wouldn't approve.) www.economist.com/science-and-...

What do guillotine and tortilla have in common? They both spell the /y/ sound as “ll” The first comes from French and the second from Spanish. phonicsandstuff.com/wordlist?wc=...

These posts delight me. It speaks to my inner word nerd.

Besides the great engagement, I like the underlying design ethos here. We can control our data and social graph. If for some reason Bluesky has issues in the future, it's easy to pick up and start elsewhere. So, Bluesky is incentivized to be user friendly.

'Mansion' has the same origin as French 'maison' (house). 'Mansion' comes from a late borrowing of Latin 'mānsiōnem' (dwelling). French 'maison' was inherited: it evolved uninterruptedly in the spoken language. The i jumped over the s. Click to listen to more words whose i did this: 1/ (thread)

Our flashcard tool is for a student working with a teacher. The student reads a word, then the teacher rates if it was Hard, Medium, or Easy for them. Currently, we only support a few scope and sequences, but plan to add an option for custom ones in the future. phonicsandstuff.com/flashcards/r...

Excellent points here! I think this doesn't apply to just balanced literacy-style levels, but also to other attempts to identify what "stage" or "phase" young readers are in. We need to focus on the specific skills that they are lacking and teach those skills. Otherwise we're just wasting time.

I'm excited to see The Reading League Virginia (@thereadingleagueva.bsky.social) join Bluesky! I've really enjoyed attending The Reading League conferences. The next one is in October in Chicago! www.thereadingleague.org/conference/

We only have 16 words in our database with the 'dj' spelling for the /j/ sound. They're all for words starting with 'adj'. Adjective is one of the more common ones. It's sort of odd that we don't pronunce the 'd' sound, but that's English for you.

These look really cool! I like the layout.

Incorporating vocabulary into real world uses is so important. It gives the brain more ways to remember them. Otherwise, they're just a bunch of disconnected words. This is a great way to tie together new terms students may see in lessons.

We released a new, free decodable reader! Find out what adventures Gran has on her trip. phonicsandstuff.com/decodables

An excellent thread of resources! I use these when adding to our Morpheme Mapper (or just for fun because I'm a nerd.)

Sadly, this is the case. If a student can't read how can they pass middle school science, English, or other classes?

Dolly Parton is a national treasure. If you have young kids, her Imagination Library will send you free kids books.

Cognitive load and explicit instruction for literacy youtu.be/H468hf7XREA?...

Morpheme Mapper tool. Check it out. phonicsandstuff.com/morpheme-map...

I read this Zig Engleman book after hearing about him on @mrzachg.bsky.social's podcast. It was great but it took me a long time to get through because I had to stop to make notes or read related studies.

The 'ur' in turkey is one of the digraphs for the sound /er/. The most common is 'er' (about 60% of the time), while 'or', 'ur', and 'ir' each occur about 6% of the time.

For anyone that wants to nerd out on the tech that runs our site, check out @ryan.phonicsandstuff.com.

Well, that was embarrassing. The audio for our games wasn't working correctly on the iPhone Safari browser. For how long? Who knows? Who now owns an old hand-me-down iPhone, so we can test these things? That'd be me! Anyway, if you have an iPhone go try our games!

Is anyone interested in beta testing our flashcard tool on Phonics & Stuff? We'd love some feedback before making it public. Send me a DM, if so.

I'm in the Fairfax county schools as a reading interventionist. Glad to meet with people and discuss!

We just put up something new in our TPT store. I use our word list builder to find consonant blend words often, but made a streamlined version for beginning readers. It also includes the direct instruction lessons I use with my students. www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Cons...