PHONICS: Not 4-square or 3-line blends!

In a few week's i'll be doing a CL05 and in CL03/4 (and presumably 1 and 2 before it) they've done the 3-line phonics blends "ph - oa - t" etc. and a listening and throw the sticky ball exercise where the PPT slide is partitioned into 4 similar-sounding blends.

Recently I've had them spell their own or other Ss names backwards and sound it out for a few weeks and have mixed up real words from the TL (rooms, subjects etc; "Eng - raphy", "comp - ra -teen" etc) into 3-lines for the last few months.

Now, I want to come up with another phonics system that can be repeated and adapted each time to recapture their imagination. Any ideas? What do others do for classes that have been her 1 year +? How do you cover phonics for older CL/CH/CJ classes?

Ta muchly

Hi Kirk,

My feeling is once students have completed Spec 3, its time to move away from the simple phonics system that you've mentioned and start to focus more on things like word stress, sentence rhythm, inferring meaning, using dictionaries etc.

Take a look in the Testing room and pick up the copy of Up and Away Phonics - which is what we cover in a Phonics 3 intensive course.

For CL04/CL05 I would focus on teaching students to break words into syllables and sounding the proper stress in words. As well as word stresses in a sentence. (There are several pages in the up and away which highlight this). **There is an awesome example where students have to choose the stress in the word 'happiness.' Try it a few times yourself, stressing each syllable and find the magic word within a word.

I would do things were students are presented with words from the dialogue and are challenged to first put slashes in the correct syllables and then choose which syllable is stressed. You could make this a team challenge, a writing relay, a quiz etc.

Come CL05 you could start to alternate between week A - syllable and syllable stress work and week B - sentence rhythm and word stress for sentences.

If you think this is something other folks in Yinzhou could use some support with I'd be happy to organize a workshop.

Cheers!

Hey Shannon,

Yeah these are all extremely helpful- if possible I'd love to hear more about phonics as I feel like although my games etc. are working at the moment, I don't wanna go stale on these types of things... if other people would feel it'd help, I'd love to have a bit more of a dialogue about this sorta thing.