Sense of Sound Spelling® – Units 5-6 and Sound Blitz DIGITAL DOWNLOAD

Sense of Sound Spelling® teaches students how to encode words by sound, pattern, and structure.

This 9-Week Bundle includes Units 5–6 plus a cumulative Sound Blitz review week, giving you 9 full weeks of explicit, engaging, and data-driven spelling instruction rooted in the Science of Reading.

As students move deeper into the sequence, instruction begins extending beyond individual sound-spelling correspondences into the spelling conventions and structural patterns that help explain how words change when suffixes are added.

Students continue moving beyond memorized spelling lists and learn:

• How sounds are represented by increasingly complex spelling patterns
• How spelling changes when suffixes are added to base words
• How to recognize and apply spelling conventions in unfamiliar words
• How syllable patterns can support accurate encoding
• How morphology connects spelling, meaning, and vocabulary
• How to transfer spelling knowledge into sentences and authentic writing

Each unit follows a predictable, teacher-friendly structure with approximately 10 minutes of instruction per day, explicit instruction, hands-on application, morphology connections, writing, review, and assessment.

WHAT’S INCLUDED – UNITS 5–6 + SOUND BLITZ✔️ Unit 5 (Weeks 19–22)

Unit 5 takes students deeper into the structure of English spelling, moving from schwa into important suffixing conventions that students need in order to accurately spell increasingly complex and multisyllabic words.

Spelling focuses include:

• Week 19: Schwa
• Week 20: Dropping silent E when adding a suffix
• Week 21: Doubling the final consonant when adding a suffix
• Week 22: Changing Y to I when adding suffixes

Rather than memorizing words such as taking, ripping, or babies individually, students learn the underlying spelling convention, practice recognizing when it applies, and then use that knowledge to encode unfamiliar words.

For example, students apply the silent-E suffixing convention across words such as taking, waved, coming, liked, faked, dining, framed, and saving. Later, they work with consonant doubling in words such as ripping, shopped, flapping, and planned, and apply Y-related suffixing conventions in words such as flies, babies, emptied, stories, nastiest, and prettier. 

Includes activities and resources such as:

• Daily structured lesson plans
• Explicit spelling rules & student reference charts
• Connected reading practice
• Teacher-led and student word sorts
• Pocket sorts
• Guided sentence writing
• Morphology connections
• Prefix, base, and suffix manipulation
• Building polymorphemic words
• Writing mini-paragraphs
• Syntax and sentence practice
• Interactive review games
• Weekly checks
• End-of-unit assessment

Week 19 begins with schwa, helping students understand the most common vowel sound in English and how it appears in unstressed syllables. Students identify schwa in authentic words and text, sort words by schwa sound, write with the pattern, and connect the learning to morphology and vocabulary. 

Morphology continues to be intentionally woven throughout the unit. Students manipulate prefixes, bases, and suffixes, build new words, record the words they create, and apply them in writing—helping students see that spelling changes are part of a larger system of word structure, not isolated tricks to memorize. 

✔️ Unit 6 (Weeks 23–26)

Unit 6 continues strengthening students' encoding knowledge with complex vowel patterns, syllable structure, word families, and Bossy R patterns.

Phoneme/pattern focuses include:

• Week 23: IGH
• Week 24: Consonant + LE
• Week 25: ILD, IND, OLD, OST, OLT
• Week 26: AR, OR

Students aren't simply memorizing words containing these patterns—they are learning to notice patterns, compare examples and nonexamples, encode words, manipulate word parts, and apply their learning in increasingly complex words and writing.

Week 23, for example, explicitly teaches IGH as a trigraph representing one vowel sound. Students read connected text containing the pattern, sort IGH words from other long-I spellings, analyze where the pattern occurs, encode words in sentences, and extend those words through morphology. 

Includes activities and resources such as:

• Daily structured lesson plans
• Explicit phoneme and spelling-pattern rules
• Student notebook/reference charts
• Connected reading passages with phoneme highlighting
• Teacher-led and independent word sorts
• Pattern vs. misfit analysis
• Guided sentence writing
• Morphology word sums and word matrices
• Prefix, base, and suffix exploration
• Paragraph writing
• Syntax and sentence activities
• Interactive games such as Phoneme Hot Potato and Roll & Write
• Weekly checks
• End-of-unit assessment

Morphology becomes increasingly sophisticated as students explore how prefixes, bases, and suffixes combine to create meaning. In Word Sums, for example, students break polymorphemic words into their individual parts, define those parts, and then use the combined meanings to understand the whole word. 

Students also use word matrices to generate word families and explore which affixes can appropriately combine with different bases, strengthening spelling, vocabulary, and morphological awareness at the same time. 

✔️ Sound Blitz: Units 5–6 (Week 27)

This is not a filler week. It’s a strategic review and data checkpoint.

After eight weeks of new learning, students spend a full week revisiting previously taught patterns through collaborative sorting, games, independent application, reading, and cumulative assessment.

The week includes:

• Day 1: Anchor Chart Sorting
• Day 2: Review Game — Bubble Pop
• Day 3: Sense of Sound Choice Board
• Day 4: Reader’s Theater — A Golden Assembly Surprise
• Day 5: Cumulative Assessment + Student Tracking Sheet

Students are not simply completing another packet of worksheets. They sort words into previously learned patterns, generate and manipulate words, complete independent choice activities, and then practice the focus patterns inside a Reader’s Theater, bringing decoding and encoding back into connected text. 

The cumulative assessment is intentionally scored around the specific spelling focus students have been taught. The accompanying tracking sheet breaks student performance down by focus so teachers can identify exactly which patterns need additional instruction and revisit them during small-group intervention or remediation. 

HOW THE STRUCTURE WORKS (TEACHER-FRIENDLY)

• ⏱ Approximately 10 minutes per day
• 📅 4 weeks per unit
• ✏️ Explicit instruction + immediate application
• 🧠 Spelling conventions taught explicitly—not left for students to guess
• 📖 Reading, spelling, morphology & writing integrated together
• 🔤 Sound, pattern, syllable structure & morphology connected
• 📊 Assessment at the end of each unit
• 🔁 Sound Blitz cumulative review after Units 5–6
• 🎯 Student data helps determine what to reteach—and to whom

WHY TEACHERS LOVE SENSE OF SOUND SPELLING®

✔ Explicit, systematic, and cumulative

✔ Focuses on encoding, rather than memorizing a list of unrelated words

✔ Helps students understand why words are spelled the way they are

✔ Moves beyond basic phonics into spelling conventions, syllable patterns, and morphology

✔ Teaches students what happens to words when suffixes are added

✔ Integrates phonics, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, reading, and writing

✔ Provides repeated opportunities to apply patterns beyond a weekly spelling test

✔ Includes engaging, hands-on activities and games

✔ Built-in assessment makes student progress visible

✔ Focus-based scoring provides more actionable data than simply marking an entire word wrong

✔ No prep guessing—your instruction and application activities are already planned

✔ Works for whole-group instruction, small groups, and intervention

✔ Complements Science of Reading-aligned literacy instruction

IDEAL FOR:

• Upper elementary
• Tier 1 core spelling/word study instruction
• Small groups & intervention
• RTI / MTSS
• Students ready to move beyond basic sound-symbol correspondences
• Teachers looking to explicitly teach suffixing conventions and more advanced spelling patterns
• Teachers looking to move beyond traditional weekly spelling lists
• Educators who want actionable spelling data—not just Friday test scores

FORMAT & DELIVERY

• 📁 Digital PDF download
• 🖨 Print or use digitally
• 🔒 For use in one classroom (school licenses available separately)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is this scripted?

It’s structured and explicit—but not robotic. You’ll know exactly what to teach and practice each day while still having the flexibility to teach like you.

How much time does it take?

Plan for approximately 10 minutes per day. The lessons are intentionally designed to provide focused, explicit spelling instruction without taking over your literacy block.

Do I need anything else?

The instructional materials are included. Some activities use common classroom supplies such as highlighters, dry-erase markers, student notebooks, coloring materials, whiteboards, timers, cups, dice, game pieces, or other simple manipulatives.

Do I need to purchase Units 1–4 first?

Units 5–6 are designed as the next 9 weeks in the Sense of Sound Spelling® sequence. These units build on students' previous knowledge and move into increasingly sophisticated spelling patterns, suffixing conventions, syllable structures, morphology, and application.

What makes Units 5–6 different from earlier units?

Students are now using what they know about sound and spelling to tackle how words change. Instead of only asking, “What spelling represents this sound?” students also begin asking questions like:

Do I drop the E? Do I double the consonant? Does the Y change? What syllable or word pattern am I seeing? What happens when I add a prefix or suffix?

That shift helps students become increasingly independent encoders rather than word-list memorizers.

What comes next?

Continue through the Sense of Sound Spelling® sequence as students build an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how sound, spelling, morphology, and word structure work together.

✨ Stop memorizing. Start encoding.

Give students more than a list of words to remember for Friday.

Give them the tools to understand how English spelling works, how words change, and how to apply that knowledge to words they’ve never been asked to memorize.