Create Custom Phonics Captions With Sound Buttons with our Phonics Sentence Flash Card Maker
At a Glance
This interactive Phonics Sentence Flash Card Maker generates custom printable sentence strips with sound buttons added automatically for Kindergarten through Grade 1. Type your own decodable sentences, mark any tricky words to highlight them, choose border colors, and export a PDF. It's a fast, flexible way to create phonics blending practice resources for whole-class, small group, or intervention use.
Help Your Early Readers With Our Phonics Sentence Flash Card Maker
If you’re teaching early phonics and you’re tired of drawing dots and dashes by hand, this Phonics Sentence Flash Card Generator is for you!
I’ve already made a single word version of this, but had requests for a sound button generator that allowed for full sentences – so here it is!
It lets you type in your own short sentences and turns them into printable phonics sentence strips with sound buttons, ready to use in whole-class lessons, small groups, or 1 to 1 practice.
The tool automatically adds sound buttons (dots, dashes and split-digraph arcs) under each word, following the sound button phonics approach used in many phonics schemes.
You can also click on any word to mark it as a tricky word so it’s highlighted in a different colour and shown without sound buttons – perfect for those words that you need to use but haven’t taught the rules for yet.
Sound Buttons – A short Intro
If you’re unfamiliar with sound buttons, they are small circles or dashes normally placed beneath letters in a word to help children break down and blend sounds more easily.
When a child touches a sound button, they practice saying that sound aloud, reinforcing their understanding of phonics. Moving along from left to right, touching each sound button and saying each sound as they go.
Sound buttons can play a very important role in early reading, helping children to more easily see how a word is broken down into its individual sounds.
For example, in the word “armchair,” each sound – ar, m, ch, air – is marked with a dot or dash, indicating whether it’s a single letter sound or a digraph (two letters making one sound) or trigraph (three letters making one sound).
These visual cues helps children recognize each phonetic part of the word, helping them to read it more fluently.
What This Sound Button Generator for Phonics Sentences Does
This tool is aimed at those just starting their reading journey or those that need a little more help with the fundamentals.
It allows you to write a short sentence and it automatically adds sounds buttons and makes a nice looking phonics flash card for you to either use on screen or print off.
You can create multiple cards with sound buttons by adding them to your set, choosing colors for each border as you go – then print the whole lot as a PDF.
As you’re writing them, you can also click on the preview for a larger pop up of the flash card to appear on screen. I thought this could be good if you wanted to practice reading together as a class before printing off the cards.
As I said, this printable phonics card maker is aimed at very early readers, so doesn’t cover all possible sounds. It won’t be perfect, but should work for the majority of words that early readers would use.
It does work for many digraphs, trigraphs and split digraphs as well as single letter sounds. Definitely enough to make some awesome resources for your little learners.
Here’s what some of the finished cards look like:
The sound buttons for single letter sounds are dots:
For digraphs and trigraphs, they are dashes:
And for split digraphs, they show an arc connecting the two sound buttons:
Oh and I hope you notice the lovely font. That’s our own Early Readers font, that has been specially designed to keep the letters clear and simple!
Well, I think that about covers it.
Follow the instructions below to generate your own phonics words with sound buttons!
And if you find it useful, to help get the word out could you please give it a little share or tell someone who you think would find it useful. Thanks!
How To Use
Create printable phonics sentence strips with sound buttons added automatically – here’s everything you need to know:
Step 1 – Enter Your Sentence
Type a short phonics-friendly sentence into the text box. Keep it to around 12 words or fewer for the best results – shorter sentences mean bigger, clearer text on the card. Click Generate Phonics Card when you’re happy with your sentence.
Step 2 – Choose Your Colors
Use the two color pickers to customize your card.
- Border Color – changes the color of the card outline.
- Tricky/Sight/Common Exception Word Color – if there’s words that don’t match your current phonics level, you can change the color of those words so that the children don’t try to blend them (more on that in Step 4).
Click the colored squares to open the picker.
Step 3 – Check Your Sound Buttons
Once generated, your sentence will appear in the preview card with sound buttons added automatically underneath each word.
- Dots appear under single letter sounds.
- Dashes appear under digraphs and trigraphs (two or three letters making one sound, like sh, ch, or igh).
- An arc connects the two dots of a split digraph (like the a and e in make or the i and e in time).
If the sound buttons don’t look quite right for your sentence, see Step 5 for how to fix that.
Step 4 – Mark Any Tricky Words
Click on any word in the preview card to mark it as a ‘tricky’ word. When you do:
- The sound buttons for that word disappear.
- The word changes to your chosen tricky word color.
Click the word again to toggle it back. This is great for words like the, said, or here – words your little learners need to use but maybe can’t fully decode yet.
Step 5 – Custom Sounds (Optional)
Not getting the sound buttons you expected? Click Add custom sounds below the preview card to open the custom sounds panel.
Type in the sounds you want the tool to recognize – for example al, tch, igh – separated by commas or spaces. For split digraphs, use the underscore or dash format, like a_e or i-e. Hit Use my sounds and the card will regenerate using your custom sound bank instead of our built-in one. Click Clear to go back to the default settings.
Step 6 – Add to Your Collection
Happy with your card? Click Add to Set to save it to your collection below. You can keep adding cards – mix and match border colors between them if you like.
Step 7 – Export to PDF
Once your collection is ready, click Export Set to PDF. Your cards will download as a PDF with four sentence strips per page, ready to print and cut.
For best results, print onto card stock or laminate for durability. A set of these slipped into a reading folder or sent home in a ziplock bag makes a fantastic take-home phonics resource.
Bonus – Fullscreen Preview
Click anywhere on the preview card (that isn’t a word) to open a fullscreen version. This is handy for whole-class reading practice on a board or screen before you print.
Hope your little learners enjoy the blending practice!
The printed phonics cards should look something like this:
Create your Phonics Sentences With Sound Buttons
Hope your little learners enjoy learning to read – scroll down to get started! Or check out our other worksheet and game makers here.
If you can’t see the phonics word flash card maker – it’s probably because you’re on a mobile device. You can try switching your device to landscape mode or if that doesn’t work, try again on a PC or laptop.
Thanks!
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FAQ
It’s a printable phonics sentence flashcard generator that automatically adds sounds buttons to your short sentences (dots, dashes, and split digraph arcs), ready to export as an A4 PDF for classroom or home practice.
Definitely. This tool is designed for early readers who are learning to blend and segment. It works well in Kindergarten / Reception for simple sentences, and in First Grade / Year 1 for slightly longer decodable sentences with digraphs, trigraphs and split digraphs (plus tricky word highlighting when needed).
It’s ideal for early years educators, reading intervention support, homeschool families, and anyone working with early readers who benefit from decodable sentences and clear phonics sound buttons.
Sound buttons (the dots and dashes under the letters) help children segment a word into individual sounds and then blend them together to read the word. They’re commonly used in phonics teaching to make the sound structure of words more visible.
A dot is used for a single letter sound, and a dash shows a digraph or trigraph (two or three letters making one sound).
Tricky words (also called common exception words) are words that can’t be fully decoded using the phonics patterns children have learned yet (like the, said, here). Highlighting them helps children spot “this bit doesn’t follow the usual code” and build quick recognition and start turning them into sight words.
Yep. You can choose your tricky word colour. This makes it so that the cards can more easily match your school’s phonics routines.
A split digraph (also sometimes called ‘magic e’) is when the digraph is split by a consonant (like a_e in make or i_e in time) and the e goes silent. The arc helps children notice that those letters work together even though they’re not side-by-side.
Because this is meant for short phonics practice sentences, not mini novels! If a sentence gets too long, the font has to shrink too much, which makes it less readable for your early readers. Short sentences keep the text big, clear, and easy to read.
The PDF prints three phonics sentence strips per A4 page (landscape). That keeps them big enough to read easily and still efficient to print and cut for groups.
A few ways:
Daily warm-ups: read together and point to each sound as you go
Guided reading / small group: notice the tricky words, then re-read for fluency
Intervention: for some quick, repeatable blending practice
Home practice: send a couple of decodable sentence strips home instead of a full worksheet.
Sentence strips are widely used to support decoding, sentence construction and reading fluency.
Yes. These sound button sentences are ideal for phonics intervention, because you can keep the text short, you can control the sounds being practised, and re-read the same sentence for confidence and fluency. They’re great for quick daily practice in small groups or 1:1 support.
Of Couse! It’s a simple way to create guided reading sentence prompts or literacy center sentence strips that match your phonics focus.
Absolutely. Parents can use these printable phonics sentence strips for quick, low-pressure home practice. This works especially well if your child is working on blending sounds but isn’t ready for longer books just yet. Keeping practice nice and short makes it far less overwhelming (for everyone involved!).
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