Sound Waves Spelling

Your whole-school approach to spelling

Sound Waves covers Foundation to Year 6, with each level of content carefully crafted to support students’ spelling success as they progress through their schooling.

View Scope & Sequence

Foundation overview

Give students the best start

The Foundation program has a two-phase structure to reflect the specialised nature of instruction required in the first year of school.

Phase 1: Exploring Sounds (Term 1)

This phase focuses on phonemic awareness.

Sound Waves Online provides you with comprehensive lesson guides and interactive slideshows so you can teach students:

  • how to identify the 43 phonemes of Australian English
  • how to segment and blend phonemes in spoken words.

After each lesson, students complete the corresponding student book page which contains phonemic awareness and pre-writing activities.

Phase 2: Discovering Graphemes (Terms 2–4)

This phase focuses on synthetic phonics.

Sound Waves Online provides you with comprehensive lesson guides and interactive slideshows so you can teach students:

  • the most common grapheme/s used to represent each phoneme
  • how to spell words containing focus phonemes
  • Focus Concepts such as special words and sentence writing.

After each lesson, students complete the corresponding student book page which contains phonemic awareness and phonics activities.

This carefully controlled sequence of teaching will have your students ‘up and running’ with reading and spelling within just a few weeks.

Plus, you can follow your systematic spelling lessons with targeted reading practice using our new Sound Waves Decodable Readers.

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Foundation class

Teaching Sound Waves Spelling

Years 1 to 6 overview


Build students’ spelling knowledge each year

Students across Years 1–6 study the same sequence of units over 36 weeks of work. A unit focuses on one or two of the 43 phonemes of Australian English.

Effective daily lessons

Sound Waves Online provides you with comprehensive lesson guides and interactive slideshows for every unit.

Each unit consists of several lessons including:

  • an introductory lesson where you teach students the focus phoneme and graphemes, and work with Focus Words
  • Focus Concept lessons where you teach students spelling and vocabulary concepts such as suffixes, homophones, and Greek and Latin roots.
Targeted student activities

After each lesson, students complete the corresponding student book activities that align with, and consolidate, the knowledge and skills you have just taught. Student books are available as a physical workbook, or as printable pages.

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Extra resources, games and activities

Enhance the learning experience throughout the week

Teaching and student charts

Use the teaching charts for whole-class instruction and activities, from introducing phonemes and graphemes to playing games. Students can use their student charts as a reference to help them to make correct spelling choices in their everyday writing.

Sound Waves charts are available in Foundation, Standard and Extended versions.

Educational games and activities

Sound Waves offers a range of games for every year level. Games help to reinforce students’ phonemic awareness skills and their understanding of phoneme–grapheme relationships.

Whether you play games using the charts or playing cards, or use the printable game templates from Sound Waves Online, there are plenty of opportunities to have some educational fun.

Sound Waves Decodable Readers

Following the same systematic teaching sequence used in Sound Waves, the Sound Waves Decodable Readers allow students to practise reading words containing the focus phoneme–grapheme relationship in context. Featuring captivating stories, charming illustrations and three levels of difficulty: support, core and extended – these Decodable Readers truly stand out from the crowd.

Students with student charts

Take the next step in your Sound Waves journey

Explore Sound Waves Online
Find out how the resources will work for your school
Speak with an education consultant