BRIGHTON EDUCATION SERVICES

Phonics for KSSR

Activities Booklet
Andy Fryett 5/2/2012

A booklet designed to provide practical ideas and a theoretical overview for phonics teaching and learning.

Contents pg. 2 Overview of phonics teaching some sounds are easier to teach than others ! pg. 3-7 - Phonics activities for teaching the 4 skills pg. 8 Phonics websites

pg. 9-10Phonetic symbols( including quiz on phoneme knowledge )

Phonics Overview Keywords Realia teaching aids such as objects from real life ( and examples from real life used for teaching ) Phoneme a sound Grapheme a letter or more than one letter used to represent a sound Reinforcement support / make stronger Supplemented -replace / added to Revive to give new life to/ wake someone up Elicit to ask students to give you an answer Some letters are easier to learn than others because they only have one sound ! In our workshops, we have stressed the importance of presenting pupils with suitable, sufficient phonics instruction: this means we need to allow our students enough practise to understand the relationship between the different sounds of English and their grapheme representations ( i.e. the letters that are used to write the sounds !) How much practise is devoted to recognition and production depends on the sound/letter. For example, learners will not have too much trouble learning the one-to-one correspondence between the sound /d/ and the letter that we use to write that phoneme, because there is only one, and, fortunately, most consonants in English display the same oneto-one characteristics. However, we also know that there are some sounds in English that can be written in several different ways ( the sound / f /, for example, can be written using the graphemes: /f/, /ph/, and, occasionally,/gh/ ). Our task, therefore, consists of using the vocabulary we teach pupils to enable them to start acquiring enough practical skill at knowing the possible letters for each sound, as well as providing reading and writing activities that develop this skill. This booklet is designed to incorporate, adapt, and extend the synthetic phonics approach adopted by the KSSR textbook/workbook. Sections are

divided into three categories: i )introducing sounds/letters; ii ) practising sounds/letters, and iii ) testing sounds/letters. Introducing Sounds and Letters There are 4 steps to this stage. Here I have used an example from year 2, but the procedure is the same for any unit/year a )Selecting words for each sound When we introduce the sounds /ai / and / / in unit 3 of year 2, we will have a number of words chosen to demonstrate the sounds ( these are provided by the textbook, but can be supplemented by others ). 3 or 4 words for each sound are enough, but a good class will be able to learn more. b )Produce flashcards / realia for our words We will need flashcards to teach these words ( e.g. the following pictures will be easy to produce/find for the /ai/ sound : toad, goat, boat; and light, thigh, and fight for //) c )Ask students to listen to the words and focus on specific sounds Students will see the pictures and hear the words selected in the previous steps, then practise saying/hearing these several times. Teachers can ask the class if the specific sound is at the beginning, middle or end of the word. We can also check recognition by asking pupils to listen to a number of words (only some will have the target sound), and to put their hand up when they hear the sound you are focusing on. d ) Introduce the word for each flashcard segmenting and blending Two words we heard a lot in our workshops on phonics were segmenting and blending, and that is because they describe essential stages within the process of learning to associate sounds with letters. Once students have heard the word and practised listening for/saying the key sound, we can introduce the letters that make that sound. It is always a good idea to ask students if they can spell out the sounds before giving them the word card for each picture. The Elkonin box is an effective method for doing this, as it helps students to understand that one sound can be written with more than letter. For example,
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to teach the word boat we could ask the class to identify the 3 sounds in the word, then place the letters in the correct box, like this:

oa

Students might find it strange that one sound is written using 2 letters, but an example like this will give you, the teacher, a chance to draw the class attention to the fact that long sounds are sometimes written with 2 letters (you could provide a few more examples just to emphasise this point ! There are no examples of long vowels in Malay, so this may need repeatedfocus. You could ask BM teachers to stress the difference between Malay and English in this regard, which might help students spelling in both languages. That kind of coordinated effort deserves one of these:

2. Practising Sounds/Letters Of course, it is not always easy to say where the introduction stage ends and the second one begins, but the most important detail in planning the practise section is to ensure that students receive enough reinforcement across the 4 skills. Often we give students a new sound/letter by writing it on the board and asking students to copy it. After that they do not get opportunities to say it/listen to it, and this lack of reinforcement can diminish their recall capacity/ability to use it. Most of the activities we use to practise sounds/letters will be found in the textbook. However, it is always useful to identify extra tasks that might supplement/complement these! The following are selected for their potential to challenge students without depriving them of some fun! Each one is marked to indicate which of the 4 skills is practised. a )Board games all four skills As we have seen in workshops, there are lots of these. Here are some simple, quick activities for the board.

 The teacher places the letter(s) for a specific sound on the board and asks students to line up then touch the letter(s) every time he/she hears them. To make this more challenging, place a number of different sounds on the board. In this example the middle sound is the one we are focusing on, and the other two are there to try and distract the students.

AIP

EE

This is also a useful technique for revising letters/sounds that have already been taught. Of course, to practise speaking we just need to point to a card and ask the student to say the sound! If we do this activity in groups then students will need to incorporate collaborative skills to perform the same task, and weaker pupils will have the chance to reinforce phonics learning with the help of more advanced learners.To ensure each student is fully engaged, we can even tell groups that the same student cannot answer more than one/two questions for their group.

b )Reading texts All texts in the coursebook are there to offer support for phonics work, since reading always involves the decoding of sounds/letters. A useful activity for low level classes/groups at this level is to ask students to look at a section of text and find examples of a letter/sound in it. Of course, in many of the texts in our textbooks the specific phonemes/graphemes are highlighted in red, so this makes our task easier. However, we can try writing our own on the board and then prompt students to indicate where certain letters/sounds are. This activity can even extend to single letters:

aefopqrstubslmnsvzeilcks
We ask students to circle/underline the key sound in the line ( e.g. the /s/ sound ) to check their comprehension of the sound/letter relationship.
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Another simple reading activity is to place letters inside a picture and ask the class to circle all the examples of one specific sound/letter they can find:

e e

Here the letter /e/ is hidden inside an elephant. The fact that the picture is of animal that starts with the same letter is also an attempt to reinforce students learning! With some effort we can use this exercise to offer the stronger students a slightly more challenging task by asking them to create their own picture and to hide letters inside it.In our session on ICT we will look at how this kind of activity can be created. c )Speaking A simple activity for encouraging students to practise saying sounds/words is the find your partner game here, the teacher gives students a sound/word on a card and asks them to find a pupil/several pupils with the same sound/word by moving round the class repeating the sound/word to others until they find a match. Write a sound/word on a piece of paper/card, and make sure there are pairs for each one. Then, give out the sounds/words to every student. Tell the class that they must say the sound/word on the paper/card out loud until they find the person with the same one. As soon as this is done, students must put their hands up. Another effective but simple activity for practising single sounds/letters is to ask students to get in a circle, then place word/soundcards in the middle. The teacher says a letter and the names of 2 students who must run to the correct card and say the word that is written on it.Here is a diagram illustrating the activity:
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Find a word with the letter N. Siti, Aiman

sip

ant

bed

Circle games are popular with students, especially the livelier ones ! I would recommend using them when you need to revive a tired class, as well as with lessons after break when pupils are usually more restless. Another one could be to ask students to play the chain game. Here, the teacher prepares a number of cards with sounds/words on them. After eliciting the sound for each card, students form a circle and a student begins the chain by saying a sound/word that appeared on the cards. The next student will repeat the previous sound/word and add another, and so on, until all the sounds/words have been recalled. Remember to use the phonics alphabet for all these activities( the one you heard in the workshop song, and which we sent to teachers afterwards) !!

Useful Websites
www.starfall.com/ www.sachem.edu/dept/sd/Phonics%20Websites.htm www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html www.abcfastphonics.com jc-schools.net/tutorials/interact-read.htm -

pbskids.org/lions/games/

The list of IPA Symbols

In your textbook there is a list of these symbols in the section before unit 1. The examples below will supplement those, and provide examples of the sounds in green. Of course, if you have internet there are sites that contain audio files for hearing words in English( e.g. www.howjsay.com/www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/ ). However, if you learn the symbols below it will be easier to practise reading words in a hard copy dictionary !

Consonants p pen, copy, happen b back, baby, job t tea, tight, button

Vowels e kit, bid, hymn, minute dress, bed, head, many

d day, ladder, odd k key, clock, school g get, giggle, ghost t church, match, nature d judge, age, soldier f v fat, coffee, rough, photo view, heavy, move

trap, bad lot, odd, wash strut, mud, love, blood

foot, good, put i fleece, sea, machine e face, day, break a price, high, try choice, boy u goose, two, blue, group goat, show, no a mouth, now near, here, weary e square. fair, various start, father thought, law, north, war

thing, author, path this, other, smooth s soon, cease, sister

z zero, music, roses, buzz ship, sure, national pleasure, vision

h hot, whole, ahead m more, hammer, sum n nice, know, funny, sun

 ring, anger, thanks, sung l r j light, valley, feel right, wrong, sorry, arrange yet, use, beauty, few

poor, jury, cure nurse, stir, learn, refer i about, common, standard happy, radiate. glorious

w wet, one, when, queen (glottal stop) department, football

u thank you, influence, situation suddenly, cotton middle, metal (stress mark

Exercises
Read the phonetic version of the words below using the IPA list. Can you change them intonormal English ?

Example
/ / = show 1 ) / f (r) / _____________ 4 ) / alnd / ______________

2 ) / d b / _____________5 ) / bj / ______________ 3 ) / j u z / 7 ) / brd / _________________6 ) / te(r)/ __________________

Now read the words below and find the phonetic version to practice pronouncing them correctly.
1 )night ____________________ 2 ) tight _____________

3 )sure ____________________4 ) rough _____________ 5 ) cough ___________________ 6 ) chimney ________________

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Review
True or False ? If the answer is false, try and correct it.

1 ) There are 55 sounds in English. __________ 2 ) There are more sounds than letters. ______ 3 ) The letters with the most sounds are a, e, i , o, and p. _____ 4 ) The letters ph are usually pronounced /f/. _____ 5 ) The letters gh are usually pronounced / t/. ______ 6 ) A silent letter is not pronounced. ______ 7 ) An example of silent letters is the gh in the word night. ______ 8 ) Another example of a silent letter is the k in words like kick or know _______

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