Sound Parts (Beta): Sound Boxes for Early Years, and Why Splitting a Word Into Sounds Is Tricky

Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by hand before publishing - see our AI transparency page for how we use AI across the app.

Ask a five-year-old to spell "ship" and the honest first question is not "which letters?" but "which sounds?". Phonics teaching in UK schools starts there: hear the word, break it into its sounds, then write a spelling for each sound. Teachers often use sound boxes for this, a row of empty squares with one square per sound, so a child can see that "ship" is three sounds even though it is four letters.

Until now, Spelling.Live had nothing like that for younger children. Word Parts breaks long words into prefixes, roots and endings, which is right for Years 3 to 6 and almost useless at five. When we checked the 500 words that early-years children have actually been set in the app, Word Parts could split just 17 of them. Early-years spelling is about sounds, so the activity had to be about sounds too.

That activity is Sound Parts, and it is now live in beta.

How Sound Parts works

1. The app says a word from your child's own spelling list.
2. Under it is one empty box for each sound in the word, and a tray of letter tiles.
3. Your child taps a tile to put it in the next box. Each tile says its sound when tapped ("sh", not "ess aitch"), so the child is listening to the sounds, not reciting letter names.
4. When the boxes are full they press Check it.

If they are right, the word is revealed with each sound picked out in its own colour. If not, the boxes that already hold the right sound turn green and stay, the others hop back to the tray, and they try again. They do not have to empty everything and start over. "Show me" is there if a word is not happening today.

There are buttons to hear the word again, hear it in a sentence, and (for words that have one) see the picture hint.

For younger children it is the Learn More tile on their home screen. Any child can have it in their weekly learning plan, where it appears as Sound Parts (beta).

What is tricky about splitting a word into sounds

Sound boxes look simple. Building them for any word a parent might type turned out to involve most of the awkward parts of English spelling. Here is the honest list, because most of it is also what makes phonics hard for children.

1. Sounds are not letters

"Ship" is three sounds: sh, i, p. "Night" is five letters and three sounds: n, igh, t. "Through" is seven letters and three sounds. Letters that team up to make one sound have to arrive as one tile, otherwise the boxes are wrong before the child starts.

So Sound Parts never just counts letters. It needs to know which letters belong together in this word.

2. The same letters make different sounds in different words

This is the trap that catches software and children alike. The letters ou say one thing in "house", another in "you" and almost nothing in "famous". ea is different in "bead", "bread" and "great". A program that guesses sounds from letters alone will get these wrong, and teach a child the wrong sound with confidence. Even our own name has the problem: is it "live" as in a live show, or "live" as in where you live? The letters cannot tell you. I wrote about that, and about why "sound it out" can lead a careful child to the wrong spelling, in The Name Is the Problem.

We avoided this by starting from how the word is actually said. Each word is checked against a UK pronunciation dictionary of about 65,000 words, and the letters are matched up to that pronunciation using a fixed table of the letter-sound pairs taught in UK phonics. So in "famous" the ou is matched to the quick, unstressed sound it really makes there, not to the "ow" of "house".

When a word's sounds cannot be matched up cleanly, it is left out of the round rather than shown with a guess. A missing word is better than a wrong lesson.

3. Some sounds are split across the word

In "cake", the long a sound is spelled a + e with the k in between. Teachers call it a split digraph. It is one sound, written with two letters that are not next to each other.

Sound Parts treats it as one tile, shown as a-e. On the reveal, the a and the silent e share a colour so the child can see they belong together.

4. Some letters are not said at all

Plenty of people say "different" as "diff-rent", with the middle e dropped. "Medicine" often loses its first i ("med-sin"). The dictionary we use records those dropped sounds, so those letters never become a tile of their own. On the reveal they are shown lighter, so the child still sees the full spelling.

5. A sound on its own is hard to say

Try saying "p" without a vowel after it. Most people say "puh", and phonics teachers spend a lot of time steering children away from that extra "uh", because "puh-a-tuh" does not blend into "pat".

Text-to-speech voices are no better. Asked to say a bare consonant, they either read the letter name or get it wrong. Our first attempt got "th" wrong. So every tile sound in Sound Parts is a short recording cut out of a real word said by one friendly UK voice: the sh from the end of "fish", the v from the middle of "seven", and so on.

Even that has limits, and this is part of why it is a beta. Short sounds like p and t have to stay short, or the "uh" creeps back. Some sounds come out a little breathy because that is how the voice says them. The s in "treasure" is a good example. We have re-cut several sounds already after listening to them, and we expect to re-cut more.

6. Accents change the answer

How many sounds is "bath"? Where are the sounds in "car"? It depends where you live. Sound Parts uses UK pronunciation and a British voice, which suits children learning UK phonics. It is not yet right for children learning US, Australian or Indian English, even though other parts of Spelling.Live now follow each child's English.

7. Even teachers do not agree on every split

A few choices have more than one sensible answer:

• "Face": is it f · a-e · c (a split digraph) or f · a · ce? We show the split digraph.
• "City": the c says /s/ on its own, so it is one tile. Some schemes teach ci as a unit.
• "Station": we keep tion as one tile, because children learn it as one chunk.
• "Story": in British speech the r is said ("stor-ree"), so a strict split would be s · t · o · r · y, with an o tile making the "or" sound. That is not something children are taught, so we keep the vowel and its r together, as most UK schemes do: s · t · or · y, f · air · y, h · er · o. A phonics specialist pointed this one out to us, and it is the kind of report we want.

We picked one rule for each of these and applied it everywhere, so the app is at least consistent. If your child's school teaches it differently, we would like to know.

Why only words with two to five sounds

A round only uses words with two to five sounds. That covers almost everything an early-years list contains: "cat" (3), "ship" (3), "frog" (4), "stamp" (5). It leaves out longer words, and we did that on purpose.

To show why, here are four longer words, split by the same process Sound Parts uses:

All four split cleanly. They are still not in Sound Parts, for three reasons.

1. Too many boxes. Six or seven boxes is a lot to hold in your head at five, and twelve is a puzzle, not phonics practice. Sound boxes work because a child can hear the whole word and keep every sound in mind while placing tiles. Past about five sounds, that stops being true.

2. Long words are mostly quiet "uh" sounds. In a short word, almost every sound is clear. In a long word, most of the vowels go soft. The e in "mystery" and the ou in "conscientiously" both make the same quick "uh" sound, which teachers call a schwa. You cannot hear which letters spell a schwa. A tile that says "uh" for e in one word and "uh" for ou in the next teaches a child nothing they can use. Older children learn these words through their parts and meanings, which is what Word Parts is for.

3. Mistakes get more likely, and harder to spot. The longer the word, the more places a split can go wrong:

• The dictionary can be wrong. Our pronunciation dictionary says "conscientiously" as "kon-si-EN-shus-lee", so it matches the sc to an "s" sound. Most people say "kon-shee-EN-shus-lee", where sc makes a "sh" sound. A child would be taught the wrong sound with confidence.
• Some tiles look strange. In "language" the second a makes a short "i" sound ("lang-gwij"). That is how the word is said, but it is an odd tile to hand a child.

With short words, we can check every split by hand. With long words there are far more of them, and each one has more places to go wrong. So we would rather show a short word correctly than a long word with a mistake in it.

Could we extend it later? Possibly, for children in Years 1 and 2 who are ready for six-sound words like "sprint" or "crunchy". We would need to check those words by hand first, and keep schwa-heavy words out. If your child is ready for longer words and you would like this, tell us through the feedback button.

What we left out on purpose

• Words we are not sure about. If a word's sounds cannot be matched cleanly, it is not offered.
• Fake difficulty. There are no timers and no decoy tiles. The tray holds exactly the tiles the word needs. The challenge is getting the order right.

If your child's list has too few suitable words, the round is topped up with simple bonus words and labelled as such. Bonus words never appear in the progress report as if they were on your child's list.

How it shows up in the progress report

A word from your child's own list that they build correctly counts towards their report, the same way Word Parts does. Because the sounds are handed over as tiles, the report notes that the word was practised with help. It is good evidence that they can hear and order the sounds. It is not the same as writing the word from memory, and the report does not pretend it is.

Sound Parts costs one credit per word when the round starts, the same as Word Parts. Your credits page shows what you have left.

Why it is a beta

The idea is solid. The detail is still being tuned:

• some tile sounds will need another re-cut;
• a handful of words will split in a way your child's teacher would not choose;
• we do not yet know whether children prefer the reveal colours or would rather just hear the word built back up.

If something sounds wrong or splits oddly, the feedback button in the app comes straight to us. Tell us the word and what you expected. That is exactly the kind of report that makes the next version better.

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Related reading

• The Name Is the Problem
• How Spelling.Live helps tricky words stick
• AI picture hints for early spellers
• Why spelling matters in KS1