A systematic phonics journey through English spelling, designed to take a child from sounding out CAT and BAT to reading SUBSTANTIAL and INTERRUPT with confidence. Each puzzle introduces or reinforces one specific pattern, with teaching notes that explain how the pattern works, where it shows up in everyday reading, and three named activities for classroom and home use.

The Core Phonics series is built around the UK Letters and Sounds framework and the US science-of-reading approach — two traditions that arrive at the same systematic phonics by slightly different routes. The puzzles cover the territory of UK Phases 2 through 6, US kindergarten through fourth grade, and home-school phonics curricula for the same age range. Below, the full series in teaching order, organised into five stages.

Stage 1: Foundation — short vowels and digraphs

The foundation layer of English phonics. Short vowels in CVC words, the -ck and double-letter endings, the consonant digraphs ch/sh/th/wh/ph/qu, soft c and g, then the long vowel teams ai/ay, ee/ea, igh, oa/ow and the short/long oo split.

Stage 2: Building Blocks — magic E, blends and beyond

The shift from sounding out to building. Magic E across all four vowels, L/R/S blends and three-letter blends, the r-controlled vowels, the diphthongs of COIN and HOUSE, the -ng/-nk endings, words ending in -le, and the first suffix (-ing).

Stage 3: Suffix Mastery

The system that builds longer words. Adding -ed, the doubling rule, dropping the silent E before a vowel suffix, comparatives -er and -est, the y-to-i rule, plurals regular and irregular, and the meaning-making suffixes -ful, -less, -ness, -ment and -ly.

Stage 4: Prefixes and Silent Letters

Front-loading meaning, and the ghost letters of English. The prefixes un, re, dis, mis, pre and sub; compound words and contractions; the silent letters of KNOW, WRITE, LAMB and DOUBT; and the most common upper-KS2 suffixes -tion, -sion, -ous, -ture and -sure, plus the first two homophone sets.

Stage 5: Advanced Spelling

Reading like an adult. Greek roots (graph, phone, scope, bio, geo, hydro) and Latin roots (port, rupt, dict, vis, man, ped) that unlock thousands of academic words; advanced prefixes inter, super, anti, auto, ex, trans; the sound-alike adjective pairs -ance/-ence, -ant/-ent, -ible/-able, -cial/-tial, -cious/-tious; and the difficult homophones that catch adults out.

All puzzles are free to download as printable PDFs with answer keys. The Core Phonics series works alongside the UK Word Lists and US Dolch Sight Words series — patterns introduced here explain spellings that appear in both.