Week 4: Interactive Whiteboard and Phonics

Welcome to week 4 of my blog! 

In our ICT workshop this week we have been looking at different ways of using the Interactive Whiteboard to teach effective phonics lessons.

We looked at the 2007 ‘Letters and Sounds’ phonics resource which aims to build children's speaking and listening skills whilst preparing them to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. The resource sets out a systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the objective of them becoming fluent readers by age seven. There are six overlapping phases and understanding these phases is key to planning and teaching appropriate phonics lessons.  

Phase 1

Phase 1 (in nursery and reception) concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills. It focuses on familiarising children with the sounds around them preparing them to begin to develop oral blending (putting individual sounds together for reading) and segmenting (splitting up words into individual sounds for spelling) skills. It is divided into seven aspects:

Aspect 1 - aims to raise children's awareness of the sounds around them and to develop their listening skills (activities include going on a listening walk, drumming on different items and making musical instruments).

Aspect 2 - aims to develop children's awareness of sounds made by various instruments and noise makers (activities include playing instruments alongside a story and making loud and quiet sounds).

Aspect 3 - aims to develop children's awareness of sounds and rhythms (activities include singing songs, listening to music and developing vocabulary for sounds).

Aspect 4 - aims to develop children's appreciation and experiences of rhythm and rhyme in speech (activities include rhyming stories, rhyming bingo, clapping out the syllables in words and spotting the odd one out).

Aspect 5 - aims to concentrate on initial sounds of words.

Aspect 6 - aims to encourage children to distinguish between different vocal sounds and to begin oral blending and segmenting.

Aspect 7 - aims to develop children’s oral blending and segmenting skills.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase 1 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas when creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase1Menu.htm

Phase 2

In Phase 2 (in reception) the children are introduced to 19 sounds. A set of letters are taught each week:

Set	Week	Sounds
Set 1	Week 1	s, a, t, p
Set 2	Week 2	i, n, m, d
Set 3	Week 3	g, o, c, k
Set 4	Week 4	ck, e, u, r
Set 5	Week 5	h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

When each set of letters are introduced the children will use their knowledge of the letter sounds to blend these sounds together and to segment words into their separate sound. The children will then begin to use their blending skills to read simple captions.

In each set the following new words can be used for segmenting and blending:

Set 1:

• (s, a, t, p) - at, a, sat, pat, tap, sap, as.

Set 2:

• (i) - it, is, sit, sat, pit, tip, pip, sip.    
• (n) - an, in, nip, pan, pin, tin, tan, nap.
• (m) - am, man, mam, mat, map, Pam, Tim, Sam.
• (d) - dad, and, sad, dim, dip, din, did, Sid.

Set 3:

• (g) - tag, gag, gig, gap, nag, sag, gas, pig, dig.
• (o) - got, on, not, pot, top, dog, pop, God, Mog. 
• (c)- can, cot, cop, cap, cat, cod.    
• (k) - kid, kit, Kim, Ken.

Set 4 contains some two syllable words and two tricky words are taught (the, to):

• (ck) - kick, sock, sack, dock, pick, sick, pack, ticket, pocket.       
• (e) - get, pet, ten, net, pen, peg, met, men, neck.
• (u) - up, mum, run, mug, cup, sun, tuck, mud, sunset. 
• (r) - rim, rip, ram, rat, rag, rug, rot, rocket, carrot.

Set 5 introduces three tricky words (no, go, I):

• (h) - had, him, his, hot, hut, hop, hum, hit, hat, has, hack, hug.
• (b) - but, big, back, bet, bad, bag, bed, bud, beg, bug, bun, bus, Ben, bat, bit, bucket, beckon, rabbit.
• (f, ff) - of, if, off, fit, fin, fun, fig, fog, puff, huff, cuff, fan, fat.
• (I, ll) - lap, let, leg, lot, lit, bell, fill, doll, tell, sell, Bill, Nell, dull, laptop.
• (ss) - ass, less, hiss, mass, mess, boss, fuss, hiss, pass, kiss, Tess, fusspot.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase2 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas when creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase2Menu.htm

Phase 3

In Phase 3 (in Reception) twenty-five new graphemes are introduced to children over a period of 12 weeks.

Set	Graphemes
Set 6	j, v, w, x
Set 7	y, z, zz, qu
Consonant digraphs	ch, sh, th, ng
Vowel digraphs	ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

In Phase 3 the children will also learn the letter names using an alphabet song and the following tricky words are introduced: he, she, we, me, be, was, you, they, all, are, my, her.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase 3 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas when creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase3Menu.htm

Phase 4

In Phase 4 (Reception) no new graphemes phoneme correspondences are taught and the aim of this phase is to consolidate the children's knowledge and to help them learn to read and spell words which have adjacent consonants (two or more consonants that appear next to one another within a word and they each represent a different sound e.g. stop, grab and milk). The following tricky words are introduced: said, have, like, so, do, some, come, were, there, little, one, when, out, what.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase 4 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase4Menu.htm

Phase 5

In Phase 5 (throughout Year 1) the children will learn more graphemes and phonemes. They will also be introduced to alternative pronunciations for graphemes, e.g. ea in tea, head and break. The following tricky words are introduced: oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked, could.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase 5 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas when creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase5Menu.htm

Phase 6

In Phase 6 (throughout Year 2 and beyond) the main aim is for children to become more fluent readers and more accurate spellers. Children’s understanding of past and present tense is developed and they are taught about the use of prefixes and suffixes.

Please click on the following link to look at some Phase 6 Interactive resources that could be helpful for lessons or for ideas when creating resources:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase6Menu.htm

Although I am familiar with the ‘Letters and Sound’ resource I found it helpful to study it as this allowed me to consider how I would teach each phase with the use of the Interactive Whiteboard.  We were also shown examples of phonics lessons and activities on the Interactive Whiteboard allowing me to observe how phonics could be taught and strategies that could be used.

We designed an activity (shown below) on ‘Smart Notebook’ software that could be used to enhance phonics teaching and learning.

This activity can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of the grapheme and phoneme correspondence for the letter ‘F’. The children put the animals beginning with f in the magic box (if they do not begin with f they will ‘pop’ back out.)

This activity can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of CVC words. 

Finally, we reviewed websites that could be used to support phonics lesson planning. I found these websites very useful as they gave me ideas on how to create my own meaningful phonic resources using the Interactive Whiteboard. Please click on the following links to see some phonic websites that can be used to support lesson planning: 

• http://www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html
• http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
•  http://www.twinkl.co.uk/
• http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/
•  http://www.earlylearninghq.org.uk/literacy/letters-sounds/

I will now familiarise myself with ‘Smart notebook’ and the use of the Interactive Whiteboard in order to make phonic lessons or activities that are engaging, effective and valuable for developing children’s phonic knowledge. I will use the Interactive White board to:

• raise children's awareness of sounds and develop their listening skills by adding sound effects and recorded sounds to create activities such as match the instrument or sound maker sound to the instrument or sound maker image
• develop children's awareness of rhymes by creating interactive nursery rhymes and activities for matching pictures that rhyme (e.g. pig/dig)
• encourage children to focus on initial sounds of words by creating interactive ‘I-Spy’ games and by matching pictures which begin with the same sound (e.g. dog/dot)
• encourage children to begin oral blending and segmenting by creating activities such as ‘metal Mike’ where the children move objects on the screen to feed ‘metal Mike’ while I sound out the name of the object in a robot voice with the children joining in. I may even add recorded sound clips for sounding out the names of the objects
• develop children’s oral blending by adding recorded sound clips that say some sounds, such as /m/-/a/-/t/ and see whether the children can match the sound to the mat image from a group of images
• develop children’s segmenting skills by showing images of objects such as a pen and asking the children which sounds they can hear in the word pen; I could place a box over the spelling and unveil it slowly to give clues or use rub and reveal techniques 
• provide opportunities for children to participate in interactive meaningful reading.

I will also provide opportunities for children to independently use the online interactive phonic resources in school and I will encourage their parents to support this at home.

I hope that you have found my blog helpful.

Enjoy the rest of your week!