Second week of school finished, and still huge amounts to organise. I think the beginning of the school year is a bit like childbirth - your brain blocks out just how difficult it is, so you'll eventually do it all over again!

I have managed to finish all of the Magic E flashcards, though - which you'll need soon, if you are following North Lanarkshire's Stage 2 programme. If not, hopefully they will be useful some time later in the year.

In Magic E words, the vowel makes it 'long' sound, or it 'says its name'. We all know this, and it often seems fairly straightforward to teach. As I've been listening to my new class sound out words, read their books, and write down a bit about their summer for me, I've realised that a few of my kiddos keep forgetting that vowels can say their names in words, and not just make their vowel sound.

If children don't realise that A can make both the short a (cat) and long a (cake) sounds (we won't even get into the other sounds that it can make!), it must all be quite confusing. And it's no wonder some kids can find it difficult to retain these phonemes.

So - a few of us will be doing a bit of work on 'A, E, I, O, U' next week. Here's a great video I used a lot with my P1s at the beginning of last year. They loved it, and it reinforced the vowel names, so when we came across words with long vowel sounds, they weren't as confusing.

I really like North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy programme for getting kids sounding out and decoding words. After my last couple of years, though, I felt like I needed to be more structured with how I taught Reading Comprehension strategies - and I wanted a 'hook' into them, that kids would remember easily. So I had a look on Teachers Pay Teachers (I'm sorry this isn't a freebie!) and came up with this pack from A Teachable Teacher.

In the pack, she gives each strategy an animal. You can see 'Retelling Rhino' above, and there are 6 more (Picturing Peacock - visualisation, Wondering Walrus - questioning, etc). The pack includes posters for each strategy, smaller versions of the posters (so you can put them on scrapbooking rings, to keep in your reading area, or for each child to have their own) and various structured worksheets that the children can use to help them get started using the different strategies.

In my class, we started with re-telling (so it is up on our wall), and I linked it last week to our writing, as the children retold their favourite day during the summer holidays. This week, I've followed up by having each reading group re-tell their own reading story as our 2nd day 'comprehension' task (I used my Story Maps - click if you need some for your own class).

In the past, my teaching of Reading Comprehension strategies hasn't been as structured as I would like. I really like this little pack, and the kids already remember 'Retelling Rhino' without any problem at all!

As we add more strategies, more posters will go up on the wall. I'm also planning to order scrapbooking rings, so every child can have their own set of Reading Comprehension strategy reminders.

Our Primary 2 (1st grade) teacher and I are both using the same pack. Hopefully, this continuity will boost reading comprehension in subsequent years as well. I love the way the animals are associated with each strategy - such a great way to help little ones remember them!

How do you teach reading comprehension strategies in your class? Are there any specific resources that you use? I'd love to hear new ideas, if you'd like to share!

Being able to retell stories is such a basic skill - but one that many of our kiddos struggle with. So that is the first reading strategy we are focusing on this year as a class - developing our ability to re-tell the main points of what we have just read.

So - as I was doing my planning, I'm having all of my groups do re-tells on Story Maps this week. BUT - I have 3 groups and 2 individuals...as I was planning, I realised that I needed 5 different story maps, because the books all have different numbers of main events.

It's fairly easy to find the standard 3-5 box story maps, but I really needed up to 8 boxes for one of my groups. In years past, I've just drawn a new Story Map when I needed it for a group. But I'm being more structured with how I teach Reading Comprehension strategies, and we are all going to be working on the same strategy, at our own levels, at the same time this year. That way, our class read alouds can also be used to reinforce whichever strategy we are currently working on.

But that would mean drawing out 5 different Story Maps this week - and then doing it again (because I'll inevitably lose the ones I've drawn - organisation isn't a strong point) in subsequent weeks. So I decided it would be easiest (in the long run, you understand) to create electronic copies.

I can't be the only one who needs Story Maps on a regular basis, so I thought I'd share them here (or you can click on the picture above). 

Hope your weekly planning is going well. The boys in our family have gone down to Knockhill for racing all day today (and they are off again tomorrow), so the girls just put in an order for pizza and we're going to watch a movie together. The rest of my planning will have to wait!

You can see the general pattern of the easiest (3 box) story map on the front cover of the pack above. Here are a couple more screenshots from the pack, so you have an idea of what you would be getting before you download anything (I know we often download things we end up not really wanting when we see them!). They aren't anything fancy, but they're all in one place and they'll do the trick!

Just trying to get all of the flashcards that are finished uploaded, before I forget that I haven't done them. As always, you can click on the picture to download this resource, or just click here.

I'm planning to teach both FF and KN next week, rather than teaching them over 2 different weeks, as most of the kids in that Phonics group know them anyway. So I needed this resource right away. It's nice to have MB finished as well, and ready for the following week.

I think I only need to do the 'magic e' flashcards, then all of Stage 2 will be finished and available for others to use. I'll let you know when that happens, but hopefully soon. Get the KN & MB cards by clicking on the picture or by clicking here.

My daughter has been (very kindly) laminating and cutting out all of my flashcards for me, then organising them into 'Stage 2' and 'Stage 3' phoneme folders. She puts all of the flashcards for a given phoneme into a polypocket, which she then labels with that phoneme. All of the phonemes are in the North Lanarkshire order, so it's very easy to find each week's resources.

As the weeks go by, and I plan/create different activities for each phoneme, a template or resources for that activity will go into the polypocket - ready for the next time I teach P3.

I think this is what is a bit sad about moving stages...I already have a similar folder organised and ready to go for Primary 1....ah, well. Such is life, right? And when/if I ever move back to Primary 1, I'll be ready to go (except by then, I may well be dissatisfied with the way my P1 resources look...in which case this process may well start all over again).Nor

Off to enjoy a Friday night movie in the living room, I think. Such excitement!

I am slowly working my way through a very long 'To Do' list. At my school, we have agreed to start sending out homework next week, so finishing my literacy (spelling words & phonemes) homework sheets was a priority.

Not the most fun way to spend a Friday evening, but a great feeling now that it is finished and printed out!

Unfortunately, my husband and I haven't found the time for an 'In Design' desktop publishing tutorial yet, so this isn't in booklet form. Maybe next August! However, I've updated the look of the pages a bit, and it worked fine last year to send it home as a packet that was just stapled in the corner. The first picture below is the packet all stapled together, with a covering letter to parents on the front. In the second picture, you can see what it looks like inside. There are 4 pages of Spelling ideas and 4 pages of Phoneme ideas (most are the same, it has to be said!). I copy them back to back, so I'm only sending home 5 pages all together (including the cover letter to parents).

I love having my class choose their own task, along with their parents. As a parent myself, I know how stressful it is when you have 3 different activities on, and your child has been assigned the most time-consuming spelling or phonics task possible - to be completed and handed in the next day! Using this packet, families can choose what they'd like or what they have time to do.

In my covering letter, I do highlight the task I often find has the most impact on pupils remembering how to spell words - 'Tricky Words'. This task asks them to tell me whether their words are 'easy' (can sound them out in a straightforward way - like 'cat') or tricky. If they are tricky, they need to tell me what makes them tricky (in the word 'again', you don't hear the 'a', for example). We always do this in class as well - talk about what makes a word harder to spell & what special things we need to remember about different words to help us. It does seem to help quite a bit more than copying out the word 3-4 times. Children can copy their word without thinking - but this particular tasks asks them to engage a bit more with how a word is spelled.

If you think this would be helpful, you can get the packet here or by clicking on the cover picture at the top of the post. Sample page from the pack below (including the 'Tricky Word' task):

I really thought I'd posted this before (I seem to remember typing that I was pleased with my cover picture - which has children playing with sand pails - covering both of the included phonemes).

I've checked back through the blog (quickly), and couldn't find them, however - and they didn't seem to already be uploaded to the site when I checked on the resources page, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to put them up again (or for the first time - I definitely have 'back to school' brain...there are so many things to do, I can't remember any of them unless I write them down).

The AI phoneme is first taught at the end of Stage 1 (often Primary 1), then it is reviewed in the first few weeks of Stage 2. The AY phoneme is the first phoneme taught in Stage 2, after all of the Stage 1 phonemes have been reviewed. It seemed to make sense to put them together, though. I know that I taught my P1s the 'AY' phoneme last year - they were writing it every day when they wrote the name of each weekday along with their date, so most of them picked it up quite quickly. Get these cards by clicking either the picture above or here.

Silly me - I started this flashcard project with the beginning of Stage 2, because those phonemes are reviewed during the first 5 weeks of Stage 3, which I assumed I would start with (I also have a few kiddos who will be going onto Stage 2 phonemes this year).

When I finally looked more closely at my handover notes, I see that my kids are starting (next week!) on FF (Stage 2, Week 35!). So I've been rushing to get these finished, and here they are. Then just 2 more weeks of Stage 2, and I'll be able to get back to work on Stage 3 phonemes.

However - if you are a Stage 3 teacher, you should be fine with the Stage 2 flashcards, as you'll need to be reviewing those at the start of the year with your class.

Welcome to anyone who has come over from the Scottish Teachers FB pages - I hope at least some of these resources are useful! I don't think there is a way to follow this page, but I've started a Monday Morning Teacher page on FB - if you like that, I'll post there whenever I add a new post/resources, so you'll get a notification.

When we start our different calculations on our 'Number of the Day', I have kids give me a 'thumbs up' (with their thumb placed right on their chest, so no arms waving in the air) if they think they know the answer to a given question. Then I take several different answers.

When another child gives an answer, I ask the class to either 1) keep their 'thumbs up' on their chest if they got a different answer or 2) give me the 'me, too' sign if they got the same answer. The 'me, too' sign is just making a 'hang 10' sign with your hand (from a fist, stick out your thumb and pinky fingers), and moving it from your chest outwards and back again). That way, I can see who is getting the right (or wrong!) answers. The idea with this routine is that EVERY child is expected to come up with an answer (and show that they have an answer by giving me a 'thumbs up'). We want everyone to be thinking!

The picture above is our first day - I wouldn't normally use quite as many cards, but I wanted to get a picture of what kinds of problems they were used to, and what was less familiar.

The picture below is our 'Number of the Day' from this morning.

Our number was 11, and we answered a few simple questions about 11, as you can see. We doubled 11 (they did that easily), then we doubled 22 - which was a bit trickier for some, but when we did it with our base 10 magnets on the white board, most of the kids 'got' what we were doing. In the picture, you can see the equations I wrote for doubling both 11 and 22 (with the 'expanded form' written below each number). In the picture, we've moved on to writing the expanded form for 11 (10+1), but when we were doubling both 11 and 22, I modelled what we were doing with the base 10 magnets - this makes the problem much more accessible to all of the kids, rather than only the kids who are comfortable working with the abstract equation.

Tomorrow, we'll add in our 'Addition' and 'Subtraction' pages.

If you'd like the 'Number of the Day' pack yourself, you can get it here. It is geared at Primary 1-3, stretching into P4, with the basic questions K-3 in the States), but it can easily be adapted to suit older stages as well (instead of giving them 11 to work with, you can give them 1147!).

Back to school is hectic! I've been trying to get all of the North Lanarkshire Stage 2 phonemes printed off at work (3 different teachers need them, either because we are teaching Stage 2 phonemes to our classes for the first time, or because we are reviewing Stage 2 phonemes before moving on) - and I realised I hadn't finished Week 3 review phonemes - such a bummer, when you think you've finished them!

These Week 3 phonemes are first taught at the end of Stage 1 - so if you are teaching Primary 1, bookmark this page, so you can come back in the Spring! But for those of you who will be reviewing these phonemes shortly, here are the OY, OA and QU picture flashcards. AI is also reviewed during Week 3, but those flashcards have been posted together with the AY cards (I thought it made sense to put the long A sounds together). Apologies for the strange combination of sounds in a single file, but I wanted to get them done as quickly as possible.

I've promised my daughters we'll watch a quick episode of Parks & Recreation, so I'm off - hope these are useful! And please keep checking back - I know I have a few more Stage 2 phonemes to finish off., and I'll hopefully be getting to those very soon.

Back to School is definitely here! One of the routines I like to start at the beginning of the year is 'Counting the Days of School'.

This is borrowed from the States, where many schools count each day they are in school, and then celebrate when they reach Day 100. That usually happens some time in February - and who doesn't need a reason to celebrate in cold, dark February?!

Along with providing some much needed cheer, however, this routine is wonderful for building number sense in our littlest learners. Last year, all of the classes in our infant department set up ‘100 Days of School’ displays, and we all counted how many days we’d been in school that year by adding a new dot into a 10 frame each morning. 

This routine is very simple and takes very little time, yet it gives children a very real sense of the size of different numbers, as well as reinforcing place value concepts. My Primary 1s (kindergarteners) did not have difficulties this year with figuring out the difference between 26 and 62 – using the ‘Counting the Days’ display gave them daily concrete experience with the reason why numbers in the 20s have 2 groups of 10, while numbers in the 60s have 6 groups of 10. And almost all of my P1s could easily read numbers beyond 100 at the end of the year (this is not something that could be said for my Primary 1s before I started this particular routine!).

This file includes a Title for your display, a page of 10 frames (just copy them to get the number  of frames that you need),and number cards for the decade numbers from 0-200. I use these cards to label each 10 frame once we fill it up. You can see this in the picture below to the left – this was my display last year. To the right, you'll see 3 images from the file you can download - as you can tell, I've given the display a bit of a face lift!

There are also some blank number cards (you can see these after the '90' below) – these are for writing the day’s number when you are NOT on the decade. For example, when you reach day 16, you would have the ‘10’ card next to the first 10 frame, then rub out ’15’ that you wrote on the blank card the day before, and change it to ‘16’. The card with ‘16’ written on it would then go next to the 10 frame that has 6 dots (in the picture, the last card says ‘177’ because that is how many dots total there are). There are number cards (counting by 10) in this pack going up to 200, as I found it was helpful to keep counting after we'd had our 100 day celebration.

I think I'm procrastinating, as there is so much to plan for this coming week!

When I wrote my last post about how I was planning to use my new Number of the Day cards, I decided that it made sense to go back and add a few cards that I used with my Primary 1s - you can see the 4 extra cards I've added above. If you want the updated pack, click on the link above. In this pack, I've also made the 'Number of the Day' sign a bit bigger. The previous pack (with the smaller Number of the Day sign) is still linked to from my previous posts).

With the additional cards, I think this pack should work well for most Primary 1-3 classes (K-2, for Americans). You can just pick and choose which cards are most appropriate for your own class. I hope you find these helpful, and I'd love to hear (or see pictures) about how you use these in your own classroom.

Well - we're back from a last minute holiday to Northern Ireland (arrived home late last night), and I have a fair amount to do before I'm ready for our in-service day tomorrow, and pupils arriving on Tuesday (eek!). But since it's been a week, I wanted to write a short post about a different approach to Number of the Day that I'm planning to try out this year.

Last year, 'Number of the Day' was a mental maths routine for my Primary 1 (kindergarten) class. It will still be a mental maths routine on some days this year, but I want to introduce 'Maths Journaling' into our maths block, and I'm hoping to incorporate our Number of the Day routine into that.

I really like the idea of Maths Journaling - getting kids to write about their mathematical thinking. The K-5 Math Teaching Resources website has a great explanation of what Maths Journaling is.

In their journals, we want children to be thinking mathematically, in an open ended way. Many of the 'Number of the Day' cards ask closed questions, but for getting started with Maths Journaling, with a new class who has never done it before, that's OK with me. :-) Once we have established our oral 'Number of the Day' routine, it will hopefully be fairly straightforward to transfer that into written form in our journals.

With P1s, I usually only used 4 cards per day (sometimes 5 or 6), but with P3s, I might eventually use more (we'll see how it goes). But if, as an example, I had the above 7 cards up (taking out the '100 less' for now!), I would ask children to draw the following simple grid in their journals (we can probably get some fraction thinking out of that!):

I know many of the 'Number of the Day' routines you find on-line have photocopied sheets with a variety of number tasks, similar to the ones you see on my cards above. But I'm always looking for ways to use journals, rather than photocopies - it makes my life easier (I have less copying and less filing to do) and it's more eco-friendly.



Additionally, it's much easier to see the progression in what the children are doing, as everything is naturally in date order in a journal (once you train your class to NOT skip pages!). Using a journal rather than a static photocopied sheet also lets you more easily change the maths skills you want to focus on and practice that day. Rather than making up and photocopying a separate sheet of paper, with different skills to practice, you can just change the cards you have up on your Number of the Day board.

After drawing the grid, the children would then fill in the answers for each card, beginning with the cards at the top. If this is already an established oral routine, then hopefully it will transfer into journals fairly easily (although that is never guaranteed, of course). The finished page would look something like this:

Once the 'Number of the Day' journaling is established, I plan to add in more of the 'open ended' journal questions. So on a separate page, the class might be asked to write and illustrate an answer to a question like:

Sally had 25 chocolate bars, she gave some to a friend and kept some for herself. How many did she give away and how many did she have left?

This kind of question is asking children to decompose 25, of course - which is a task they will be familiar with from the 'Addition' and 'Subtraction' sheets in our mental maths routine.

I'll let you know how it goes once school is back, and we get this up and running!

Above, you see the 'Addition' and 'Subtraction' sheets I've created in my Number of the Day pack (see my post below for a bit more information about it, as well as some screen shots of pages from the pack). Last year, I just used plain laminated sheets of paper, but I wanted it to look a bit nicer this year! But the important thing isn't how they look, really - it is how they are used. So this is what we did...

After we completed 4-6 of the 'Number of the Day' task cards (see my previous post if you'd like to download these cards to use in your own class, or you can just click on the pictures above), my kiddos and I used these Addition and Subtraction sheets to come up with all of the addition sums for our 'Number'. So, if our number was 9 (as in the picture), the kids would first give me all of the sums that added up to 9.

I really liked this routine, as I think it developed and strengthened a variety of maths skills and knowledge. At the most basic level, the class was getting daily practice with their number bonds to 10. However, this routine also developed their understanding of how numbers work, so that they were beginning to be able to think strategically about how to solve maths problems.

When the first child gave me 4+5, I'd then ask the next child to 'flip' the addends for me - so they would tell me that if 4+5 = 9, then 5+4 = 9 too. They knew (and it was reinforced frequently) that it didn't matter which number you started with when you added - you always got the same answer. This helped a lot when it came to sums like 4+10...they knew they didn't have to start with the 4, just because it came first!

This routine also developed 'part-part-whole' thinking. Instead of being given 2 numbers and being asked to add them together, the kids were being given the answer. They then had to split it into 2 different groups. Knowing that numbers can be split up in many different ways is such an important skill for developing a variety of mental maths strategies. With this daily routine, the kids were getting lots of practice splitting our Daily Number up in many different ways.

After we found all of the adding sums, we moved to Subtraction. Using the same number (9, in the picture above), the kids gave me all of the subtraction sums that start with the number 9. Again, at a basic level, we were practicing our subtraction bonds to 10. But I think the value of this goes beyond that.

I always did Subtraction AFTER Addition, so that the kids could use the addition sums to help with the subtraction equations. We talked often about how addition and subtraction were opposites - if we start with 4 and add 5 to get up to 9, if we take that 5 away again, we're back at 4. I often used my Learning Resources Base 10 materials to model this on our magnetic white board.  

We also 'flipped' our subtraction sums. So when the first child gave me 9 - 6 = 3, I'd ask the next child to give me the matching equation: 9 - 3 = 6. Again, I usually modelled at least one of these using the Base 10 materials - kids need to 'see' what we are doing when we are adding and taking away.

As I move to Primary 3 this coming year, I'll need to modify this a bit, of course, as the kids will be working with larger numbers. If our number is 23, for example, I don't think ALL of the addition and subtraction sums for 23 will fit onto our sheet! But I think that having children come up with 4-5 addition sums (and flipping them), along with 4-5 subtraction sums (and their matching equations), will continue to be an efficient way to help my class develop number sense. I'll let you know how it goes - as I try it out with my class, I'm sure I'll need to adapt my current plans to meet the learning needs I find!

I've spent the afternoon planning for our first week back - the joys! One of the things I've been looking at is how to introduce the structure of our Maths block. The more daily routines that can be established during the first week, the better, right?

Mental maths is a regular component of our whole class maths time, and it is usually how we begin our maths block. In P1, my class enjoyed our 'Number of the Day' routine. As it's a structure that can easily be adapted to different age groups, I was re-looking at it this afternoon, with a view to adapting what I've been doing for Primary 3.

I knew I needed to adjust the difficulty level. But like my picture flashcards, when I looked again at the 'Number of the Day' cards I used last year, I thought they would benefit from a bit of an overhaul. You can see some of the cards I used last year in the picture below (the different 'task cards' changed each week or every other week, to keep the routine fresh and to make sure we were practicing a variety of maths skills). 

So - I've redone the cards for myself, and added a link so that you can use them as well - click on the picture above if you think these would be helpful in your own class (you can have a look at the pictures below to see how the new cards look). I've been aiming the cards at a Primary 3 level (2nd grade in the States), but I suspect they'd also work for some Primary 2s and 4s as well.

In the file, there are a variety of different cards, so you can pick and chose what will work for you. I've also included sheets that can be used like the 'Adding' and 'Subtraction' sheets (in white and orange respectively) in the picture to the right. I'm planning on copying the sheets from my new pack onto different coloured paper, so that the 2 operations are clearly differentiated from each other for the class.

I need to get back to my planning, but I have some more thoughts on how I've used Number of the Day in the past, as well as ways I'm planning to change my NotD routine this year. Please check back if your interested in hearing a bit more about how I've used this resource and how I plan to use it this coming year. Hope your Back to School planning is going well!

Today has been a busy day - I was helping out at a Holiday Club this morning, then took my daughter and a friend swimming this afternoon. My husband is currently getting dinner on the table, so we can run the two girls up to gymnastics practice (which starts very soon!).

But I managed to get most of this LONG A resource finished last night - just needed to finish off a few things before I could get it posted. I was pleased with the picture of the children playing with sand pails for the front (it's good when you can be pleased by the simple things, right?).

Link is clickable, as always. There are quite a few picture flashcards for both phonemes (dipthongs for Americans), organised in difficulty order. Hopefully this will be useful - I thought it made sense to put these two long A sounds together. I'm still working on finishing all of the CVCe picture flashcards (which will have the A-E spelling pattern in it, of course).

Now - this evening I really do have to start getting some actual 'Back to School' planning done, as we are starting again in a week and a half (and we are away on holiday most of next week - eek!).

In the North Lanarkshire Active Literacy programme, all of the 2 letter combinations that make a single sound are referred to as 'phonemes', so that's what I tend to use when I'm writing about them.

In the States, however, consonant phonemes and vowel phonemes are differentiated. Sounds like 'WH' and 'PH' are called digraphs, while vowel or vowel/consonant combinations like EW are referred to as dipthongs. Gets a bit confusing!

In other literacy programmes, there is much more emphasis on 'consonant blends' - which is something that the North Lanarkshire programme doesn't really focus on. Some kids pick the blends up easily, while others need more practice. I do think it is helpful to be able to build up word difficulty more slowly for some groups, so I've tried to include words (grouped together) that work on initial and ending blends when kids are learning a given phoneme (digraph/dipthong).

Hope this quick explanation helps, for any visitors to the site from the States.

Here are another 4 packs of picture flashcards/wall words for the phonemes CK, EA (long e sound), AU and EW (click on the pictures above to access the files you want). Hopefully some or all of them will be useful to you!

As I've been making these packs, many of the files have become quite a bit longer than they were originally. Depending on the kinds of words that tend to have a given phoneme in them, I've added 'ing' words, compound words, words ending in 'y', etc, so that teachers have the option of using these flashcards to reinforce different types of decoding strategies, word endings, spelling patterns, etc.

However, when I've personally downloaded free files from the internet, or bought packs on Teachers Pay Teachers, I've sometimes made the mistake of printing everything out, thinking that more must be better.

Sometimes that's been fine - but other times, I've ended up with too many bits and pieces, because I haven't really thought through how I was going to use the resources I've printed out.

Hopefully, with the way that I've organised these files, that won't happen to you! As teachers, we know our own classes. With respect to the different kinds of words in each of the files I've been posting, you'll know whether certain words are too easy, too hard or just right for your own kids. I've tried, as much as possible, to make it so that you can easily print out just the right kind of words for your class, while skipping pages that contain words that are too easy/too hard.

I do understand, though, that sometimes it's nice to print it all out (I suspect that's what I'll be doing!) - and if you choose to do that, the words are already organised by difficulty level for you, so if you don't use the compound words (for example) this year, they are ready to go if you need them in subsequent years.

Now - off to do a bit of 'Back to School' planning! I hope your plans are further along than mine are...

A new set of OW (as in snow) flashcards/wall words are ready (picture is clickable as well). Hope you find them useful! All of the OW words in this pack make the long O sound. I will (hopefully soon) get around to making another set of OW words - but next time, they'll be OW as in 'Owl' flashcards.

As I was making these cards, however, I found myself re-using clipart images. Clipart (especially clipart you can use for files posted on the Internet) can be difficult to find - and cute clipart is even harder to source! So when you have attractive images that fit a variety of words, you tend to re-use them.

I had wondered about this as I was making the cards, but then I got to thinking about the different strategies we use when teaching little ones to decode words. One of the strategies children learn and use frequently when they are early readers is 'using pictures to help you figure out words'.

This is a useful strategy, of course - but how often do your kiddos look at the picture and read 'rabbit' when the word is 'bunny', or read 'boat' when the word is 'ship' (etc, etc)? Looking at pictures will only get children so far - they need to be paying attention to the letters (and more than just initial letters!) in their words as well.

As I've been making these flashcards, then, and re-using clipart, I've started to re-use images quite deliberately. In the OW file, for example, there is a picture of a firefly for the word 'glow'. I've used this same firefly in the IGH package to represent 'bright'. And when I get to the I-E (Magic e) package, I'll use it again for 'firefly'. Similarly, the whale image I used in the WH flashcards does double duty in the OW package when it represents 'blowhole' (to be fair, I've also included an arrow pointing to the blowhole, to help make it clearer!).

I plan to make this a feature of how I use these flashcards to teach new phonemes - as a class, we'll have a look at how the same picture can be used to illustrate different things. Then we'll relate that to our reading, and how important it is to use the pictures along with the letters in a new word to figure words out when they get tricky.

I always find that there are so many different parts to developing literacy skills in our kiddos that it's hard to fit everything in. As I've been creating these flashcards/word wall cards, I've seen that many of these phonemes lend themselves to teaching compound words. Doing 2 things at once is always a winner when you are a teacher!

The IGH, EW and AW packs above (all pictures are clickable) have compound words (grouped together) included. If your kiddos are ready for them, you can choose to use the compound word cards when you teach that phoneme. If your kids aren't quite there, there are plenty of simpler words to start with. Compound words are a great way to develop decoding skills, as they highlight for our kids how helpful it is to use the 'find a smaller word' strategy.

OU words didn't seem to lend themselves as easily to teaching compound words, but at the end of the file, I've included 3 words ending in Y (cloudy, bouncy, mouthy) - that ending Y making the long e sound can be quite tricky (more so for spelling than for reading, in my experience). The 3 base words (cloud, bounce, mouth) are also included. These should provide useful reinforcement of this phoneme, although I also have a completed pack of flashcards for the Y (long E) phoneme as well: