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After learning basic phonics (letter sounds, letter combinations, and common irregular words), students begin to encounter exceptions to standard rules occur frequently--silent letters, compound words, and inflected endings like -ed. They may notice that some letter patterns occur at the ends of several words (word families) and can use this insight to accelerate their learning.

The objective of the Advanced Phonics sequence of activities is to teach students to read word families, compound words, contractions, double-letter words, silent-letter words, -ed words and -s words.

Examples of each type of word are:

• Word families: back, lack, black
• Double-letter words: fill, miss, chill
• Silent-letter words: lamb, sock, answer
• Compound words: bedbug, sandbox, firefighter
• Contractions: it's, I'm, can't
• -ed words: melted, filled, kicked
• -s words: bats, bugs

The sequence of activities here was constructed on the following principles:

• The first examples introduced are regular so that students can focus on a single irregularity at a time.
• The different patterns covered here are interleaved so that new skills are being learned while existing skills are practiced, helping students learn more thoroughly.
• A redux is provided at the end of the sequence to help consolidate the complete set of skills.

Note that structural phonics (morphemic analysis)--such as affixes and multisyllabic words--is not covered here; it is a topic more suited to second grade.