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.

The next set of Wall Words/flashcards are ready. AW is first introduced in Week 10, if you are following North Lanarkshire's Stage 2 phoneme programme. It is reviewed during Week 1 of NL Stage 3 - so if you are teaching Primary 3 this year, you'll need these right away.

When you open the file, don't worry if the font looks unclear. It doesn't look great on my copy of the PDF file either, but when you print it out, the lettering looks clear and crisp. I think there must be something a bit odd about the way that the font I've used is interacting with the display aspect of Acrobat. But the new fonts I've been trying out on the cover pages are so cute (much better than Comic Sans!), I think it's worth it, since everything prints out OK.

All of the flashcards I've made use the same font, so if you choose to use them, they will all coordinate.

Please let me know if you have any problems, and as always, feel free to send other teacher friends along to the site, if you think they might be able to use these flashcards in their own classes.

The next 2 sets of Wall Words/flashcards are finished and ready for anyone to download and use - this file contains TH and NG flashcards. I hope you find them useful! In most of these sets, I've tried to find at least 12 age-appropriate words containing the target phoneme. I've also tried to divide them into 6 easier and 6 trickier words (in the file, I've arranged the words in order...roughly...from easiest to hardest). In the NG set, you'll find 4 verbs with the 'ing' ending - teaching verb endings is a great way to quickly expand decoding skills (kids get such a boost when they can read 'long words' like 'sitting' easily!).

I use these cards to introduce a new phoneme on Monday - we read the flashcards together as a class, and then I always have plenty of volunteers to help me transfer the word cards onto our 'Word Wall'. As you can see in the picture below (it's a screenshot of a page from the file you'll download), I always have a 'Phoneme (dipthong for American readers) Card' that gives the phoneme and a picture hint. All of the word cards are then posted under/around the Phoneme Card (depending on how crowded my wall is, and how many word cards I want to put up).

These cards then stay up all week (and beyond), for children to use as a resource for various phoneme-related tasks they are given throughout the week. I like to leave at least some of the cards up over the longer term - children need lots of repetition/reminders before some of the trickier phonemes move into long-term memory. Depending on your own wall space, and display policies at your school, you can chose to leave all or only a few word cards up, or you can transfer the Phoneme Card onto a 'Phoneme Pocket' (also attached to the wall) and put all of the word cards into the pocket - that way children can go and get them when/if they need them, but it takes up much less space than displaying everything.

Below, you can see all of the TH flashcards. 'This' and 'that' are difficult words to match with pictures - but so important for our kids to know to facilitate fluent reading and writing. The NG words are laid out similarly. 

Please try them out and let me know what you think! And if you have any teacher friends who would find these useful, please send them over to my blog as well. :-)

I'll be adding more Wall Words as I get them converted into PDFs - why not bookmark or favourite this site, so you can get back easily to check what's available?

This is taking much longer than I anticipated. I originally made all of my wall words in Microsoft Word (see my previous post, in which I was very happy they were all finished!).

AFTER I finished all Stage 2 and Stage 3 words, however, I realised that I could only find directions for converting Powerpoint files into the right kind of files for uploading to the internet (e.g., files in which images are 'flattened' or secured in the document so that they can't easily be copied and pasted into other documents). Nothing about converting Word files the same way.

So....I spent yesterday and today figuring all of this out, and converting my CH and SH wall words into a PDF files (this is more complicated than it should be, my husband tells me). I think my margins are slightly screwy in this document, but I don't think that will affect the flashcards/wall words.

You can click on the above link or the image to access the file, and I'll also put a link to the document in the Resources section. If you download these and use them, please do let me know how you get on and if there are any problems with printing, margins, etc. that I need to sort out. Hope these save you some time! These phonemes (dipthongs for any American readers) are first learned in Primary 1 in the North Lanarkshire Active Literacy programme, and then they are reviewed at the beginning of Primary 2.