How to build words

Tap on letter-sound tiles to build words using letter-sound patterns.

Watch and listen to the speech sounds that are made by the mouth as you tap on the tiles to help students with phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge. Use Word Builder to show students why words are spelled the way they are, or have students spell words themselves to understand the relationships between English phonemes, graphemes and letters!

 
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YOU CAN WRITE 99% OF ENGLISH WORDS WITH WORDBUILDER! HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES:

See those buttons under the graphemes? When students tap or slide their fingers over them,

the mouth in Word Builder articulates the speech sounds. Here's another word:

Those symbols on the buttons (between the brackets) are the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols for the speech sounds represented by the letters. They are the same symbols used in dictionaries to help people pronounce words correctly. They are not there for the students to learn! They are to help the person helping the student to become more aware of which speech sounds words are made up of. Here's another word:

See the letter 'e' at the end of the word 'spade'? That's called a 'silent e' (sometimes called a 'bossy e' or 'magic e'). Notice that there is no button under it. That's because it doesn't represent a sound in English. Instead, it causes the letter 'a' to represent its 'long sound' ('a' like in 'alien, instead of 'a' like in 'apple'). Word Builder can be used to teach similar patterns in spelling and reading. Here's another word:    

Notice that in the word 'chips' we use two letters, 'ch', to represent one speech sound. That type of spelling pattern is called a 'consonant digraph'. Word Builder includes all of the common consonant digraphs in English, such as 'sh' (like in 'ship') and 'th' (like in 'mouth'). It also includes all of the common vowel digraphs and r-controlled vowels, lke the 'ea' and 'ore' in this word:    

Using graphemes - the building blocks of English spelling - you can also use Word Builder to write complex, longer words for advanced students, such as: