Recommended Age: 4 years and onwards
Purpose: To make possible further exploration of the child’s own language and to give more keys to reading, writing and spelling.
Level of Parent Involvement: Medium, the adult must present this exercise to the child for the first time, once shown the child may repeat the exercise independently.
Prerequisites
- The child must know all if not most sandpaper letters
- The child has worked with the phonogram object box
- The child has memorised at least 3 sandpaper phonograms
Materials
- The small moveable alphabet (2 boxes of letters of the alphabet, one in black, one in red)
- OR the paper version if doing this exercise at home from the resource pack
Preparation
- None
Steps
- Invite the child to get a mat, show the child the small moveable alphabet boxes, ask the child if they would like to carry the box with the red letters or the black
- Bring the boxes to the mat, take the lids off the boxes, setting the boxes on top of the lids
- Ask the child to find a couple of letters, “can you find ‘a’ in your box, can you find ‘m’ in your box?”
- Child places letters back in the box
- Remind the child of their work with the phonogram box, asking the child “what was your favourite object from the phonogram box?”
- Let’s say for example the child responds with ‘cloth’, sound out the ‘c’, ‘l’, and ‘o’ with the child
- Then say to the child ‘what is the end sound you can hear?”, helping the child to identify the ‘th’ sound, help the child find the ‘t’ and ‘h’ from the red box so the child can clearly see the ‘th’ phonogram (c, l, and o are in black letters)
- Then say to the child “let’s think of some other words that have the ‘th’ sound”
- The child may build more words, making the phonogram with the red letters
- Focus on only one phonogram at a time
Small Moveable Alphabet @ home
Materials:
- Paper version of the small moveable alphabet (2 sets of cards, one set of the alphabet is in black the child’s teacher will provide red letters for the phonogram to be used, in this pack the red letters provided will be for the phonogram ‘sh’)
- Image cards
Steps:
- Invite the child to the activity, letting them know they will need their work mat (you may use a towel if you don’t have a mat)
- Bring the paper moveable alphabet to the mat/towel
- Lay out the black cards in alphabetical order (the child may help)
- Show the child the red letters letting the child know that they will be making words with the phonogram ‘sh’
- Invite the child to make ‘sh’ with the red letters
- Show the child the image cards, the chid may choose one
- For example, ‘shop’
- Invite the child to build the rest of the word after the ‘sh’ with the black letters, placing the ‘o’ and the ‘p’
- The child may choose another image card, for example ‘shell’
- Invite the child to place the ‘sh’ in red, then build the rest of the word with the black letters (refer video)
