If you have been following my Instagram stories and blog posts you will know that I am teaching my son Sam some very basic early alphabet and sound awareness using the resources in my Let's Learn the Alphabet series.
If you have just stumbled upon this post, you may like to hop back through the previous post I have done over the last few weeks HERE
In the classroom, this would not be my 'literacy program' - it would be the short, structured, focused mini lesson for 'phonics'.
Today we read some 'o' stories to contextualise our learning.
We looked at some 'o' words using the word cards from my resource packet, and also talked about 'o' words as we found them in the books.
We learnt a little song to remember our letter sound and practiced writing it with correct formation.
We briefly looked at all the previous sounds we have learnt and revised them.
We added 'o' to our growing sound book.
We spent just a few (but very precious) minutes seeing if we could combine the letters we have learnt to make words.
Today I even showed Sam the 'ot' word family chunk and showed him how to combine it with a consonant to make a word. It took 2 minutes. This is very valuable learning. I did not labour the skill or drag on the activity for too long.
What I have found in my years of teaching early reading is that if you do these word building activities very early and within the context of learning new sounds progressively, you can save a lot of time down the track. I have only had to formally teach 'word families' once - all my other classes could read and write all word family based words confidently {for example, ot, og, ip, et, an) without having to do a single worksheet!
The trick is to introduce it within the boundaries of your regular daily single-sound phonics lesson and to make it consistent, regular (every time you introduce a new letter sound), fun, hands-on and pressure-free!
Find a FREE 'o' worksheet in google drive, to add to your collection, by clicking on the image below:
Have a wonderful day!
- Mel x