Interactive 'phonics-friendly' dictionary
The South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) is an educational trust that comprises 15 local authorities in the South-West of England. As well as providing broadband internet connectivity to many educational establishments in the region, SWGfL has developed a number of broadband-enabled digital learning resources. SWGfL engaged studioVerse to help in developing a 'phonics-friendly' online dictionary for primary age pupils.
Phonics supports early reading. Spoken English in Britain uses 44 different sounds (phonemes) and in the written language each sound is represented by one or more letters (graphemes). By learning how to associate sounds with letters pupils develop strategies for decoding (reading) letters into sounds and encoding (spelling) sounds into letters. In English many sounds can be represented in more than one way (such as the sound /SH/ in the words she, chef, sure), but as children learn common sound-spelling relationships more and more words become accessible to them.
The Word Detective is designed to be 'phonics-friendly' and encourage pupils at key stages 1 and 2 to discover new words and sound-spelling relationships. Words in the dictionary can be 'sounded out' to hear the individual sounds that make up a word e.g. /AI/ /K/ /OR/ /N/ (acorn). The dictionary can be searched by keyword or browsed by category. In addition, pupils can search for words that contain specific sounds and see their different spelling patterns.
When searching, if a search term is not found, the 'suggested spelling' feature will generate suggestions by using the sound of the search term e.g. bikoz (because), febaree (February), tugeva (together). The dictionary also allows pupils to search for 'sounds like' words and will find similar sounding words regardless of their spelling e.g. plum sounds like drum, thumb, some.
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