Phonics and Literacy through Arts and Crafts

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1 Phonics and Literacy through Arts and Crafts Spice up reading and writing activities! Phonics and teaching English In the UK, students in lower primary are systematically taught phonics: how to learn letters by sounds and sound combinations When teaching English as a foreign language, teachers can use phonics at any level in order to reinforce the pronunciation of certain words and students reading skills in general Students who are introduced to phonics tend not to make the typical pronunciation mistakes when reading that other learners of English make Phonics Flashcards Engage your students in making alphabet flashcards On one side they print or paint the letter in upper and lower cases On the other side, they draw words beginning with the letter sound (the phoneme) Letter A, for example, could include a picture of an apple, an ant or an alligator but not an aeroplane, Australia or an aunty as the pronunciation of A in the latter is not the same as the letter sound Make two copies of each flashcard and play Noisy Letters Noisy Letters* Hand out alphabet flashcards to your students Give the same letter to two students The students read what is on their card and then give it back to you Tell your learners to walk around the room saying and repeating the phoneme represented on the card until they find the person with the same sound as them When they find the person they get into pairs and try to the recall words on the alphabet flashcard *Activity taken from The National Literacy Strategy Phonics Progression in Phonics: Materials for whole-class teaching, Department for Education and Skills, UK,

2 Phoneme Fans* A phoneme fan is a series of letters printed on strips of card They are simple and fun to make You can make phoneme fans with your students Invent different colours and designs with the letters you want to use (eg n, g, t) Say a word out loud, for example sun Write the first letters on the board and ask the learners what sound goes at the end When they have told you, ask them what an n looks like by holding up the appropriate letter on the phoneme fan Activity tip Here are some suggested words for Phone Fans Say game: fun, run, bin, win, log, jog, dog, frog, hot, pot, not, hit, sit, fit, bat, cat, fat, hat, etc *Activity taken from The National Literacy Strategy Phonics Progression in Phonics: Materials for whole-class teaching, Department for Education and Skills, UK, 000 My Sounds Book To help connect sounds and spelling, make a sound book with your students Decide which words and sounds to start with according to your own teaching criteria, but take into consideration that high frequency words are always useful For example, the phoneme sound two could include the following words on the page entry: kangaroo, boot, shoe, new, blue, drew, through Always underline the sound so that learners connect sound and spelling Help your learners illustrate their books by drawing pictures or cutting them out of magazines 98

3 Phonics and Literacy through Arts and Crafts Rhyming Words Improve students pronunciation by teaching them rhyming words Technically, a word that rhymes has exactly the same sound at the end but a different stem or initial letters For instance, tree, sea, monkey and me all rhyme even though the end spelling is different in each case Suggested activity The Rhyming Tree Design a tree which has groups of rhyming words hanging from its branches Students can then write sentences to include words from the same branch A sentence must be grammatically correct, but not necessarily contextual or make great sense For example: A monkey is in the tree with me looking at the sea Illustrate the sentences with pictures Mini-books First prepare a worksheet which contains text boxes of simple sentences from the story you will read When students listen to the story (for the second time), they put the story in the correct order by writing a number in the corner of the text box Then they cut out the text boxes and stick them into a booklet A pages folded in half and stapled together are the simplest Students illustrate their minibook and make a display Reading and Story Activities Illustrations Illustrations are an ideal way of linking Literacy with Arts and Crafts Students can illustrate characters from a story book and write a summary of their likes and dislikes, physical descriptions or personalities Alternatively, different groups can illustrate a scene from the text and write a line or two of accompanying text (depending on their level) Learners can design alternative cover illustrations and titles They could make up a new front cover for the story book and these can be put together for a collective display Story Mobiles Having read a story to your class, students make a hanging mobile to depict the story Divide the story into parts and give each group a different section Finally, pupils tell their part of the story to the rest of the class The learners read this section again and design a mobile accordingly The mobile can contain elements such as characters, objects, emotions and landscapes 99

4 Shared writing Shared writing involves the teacher and students composing a coherent text together The teacher writes and provides the structure or support for learner s language and ideas In this way our learners can see the process of writing (thinking of ideas, putting those ideas into sentences and then constructing a text) modelled for them Hopefully, they will absorb the mechanics of this process for future individual writing tasks Painting self-portraits It is fun to copy the style of an artist (Picasso, Van Gogh, Dali) having studied the painter or after a visit to a museum Make a wall display of the portraits and select a simple shared writing activity to do with them Provide the following gap fill (structure) Art postcard collections Art postcards can be found in museums, bookshops, stationary stores and as greetings cards They are a useful teaching resource and an aesthetic complement to any classroom Try to collect a variety of postcards of different artists, styles and art periods and create a table display Allow students to pick them up and study them in detail Experiment with some of the following shared writing activities always brainstorming the vocabulary pupils might need beforehand This is me I have got eyes and hair I have got a mouth and a nose My face is We are alike We both have and Guess who? EDELVIVES Photocopiable sheet This person has eyes and hair He/she has a mouth and a nose Who is it? 00

5 Expressing opinions I (don t) like this picture because it s Expressing emotions This picture makes me feel because Comparing These pictures are similar because Contrasting These pictures are different because Describing a memory This picture reminds me of Describing a scene In this picture I can see Giving facts This picture was painted by in year This artist was (artist) (description) EDELVIVES Photocopiable sheet 0