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.

The images to the left will be familiar to anyone working with North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy programme, I'm sure (although the book covers have changed).

Having taught Primary 1 for the last couple of years, I have Active Literacy Stage 1 resources covered. However, since I'm moving to Primary 3 next year, I'll need resources for Active Literacy Stages 2 and 3 - which is a lot of resource creation!

When I'm teaching a new phoneme, I like to have flashcards with that week's phoneme that the kids can read as a class as part of our introductory mini-lesson on that phoneme. These flashcards then go up on our 'Phoneme Word Wall', as a permanent reference resource. I give the class different activities based on that week's 'Wall Words' to reinforce phoneme learning throughout the week - so I get a lot of mileage out of these flashcards.

Because I use them so much, I want the flashcards to look good and to be appealing to the kids. I also want to make sure they are accessible to ALL of the children in the class, so I find pictures to go with each word (there are a few exceptions - I haven't found pictures for words like 'have' and 'live', I'm afraid). Once I have all of the flashcards done for the Phoneme Wall, I'm planning to turn the wall words into 'bean bag' cards for our bean bag game (which I'll hopefully tweak a bit for the older children, to make it a bit more challenging...that's still a job for the future, though).

I'm currently making the flashcards for Week 30 of Stage 3 - it's such a good feeling to know that once they are all made, printed out, laminated and cut out (OK - so there is quite a bit of work still to be done!), my phoneme programme will be good to go for the year. That should free up quite a few Sunday hours throughout the school year! After Stage 3 is finished, I'll move back to Stage 2.

My technical consultant (my husband!) is home from Africa, so hopefully he'll be able to help me convert all of my files so that I can post them on-line for others to use. Under the terms of use for much of the clipart I'm using for the pictures, all files must be 'flattened', so that the clipart can't be easily extracted. Please do keep checking back, though, as I'm hoping to start getting files up in the next week or so...