Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

5 minutes

Tune In: Phoneme-grapheme correspondences

10 minutes

Find Out: Blending

5 minutes

Take Action: Word chains

10 minutes

Take Action: Decoding

Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

Students will:

blend and segment single-syllable consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant (CCVC) words.

Students can:

segment and pronounce the most common sound for the phonemes
blend the graphemes to produce CVC, CCVC words.

Tune In: Phoneme - grapheme correspondences

Step 1

One at a time, display each of the letters and ask students to say the sound they represent (if the student says the name, tell them, “Yes, that is the name of the letter, but what sound does it make? You may need to reinforce /ff/ /ll/ /ss/ and /zz/, reminding students that they are the same phoneme as /f/ /l/ /s/ and /z/, but are a different grapheme (spelling) representation.

An alternate activity is to have the students arrange their sticky notes, magnets or cards into alphabetical order.

Find out: Blending - CVC and CCVC words

Step 1

Provide your students with a whiteboard, marker, eraser and the letter tiles. Set up the teacher whiteboard as per illustration, with the sticky notes for each letter at the top of the board and 4 lines, one for each grapheme in the word, below.

Tell your students, “Today we are going to practise making words that may contain digraphs. When we write the digraph it goes on one line, because it makes one sound”.

Step 2

Tell students, “We are going to make the word “slam”, repeat slowly elongating the sounds “ssslllaaammm”.

Bring the letters <s> <l> <a> <m> down from the top of the board, avoiding placing them in the correct order. Ask your students, “What sound do each of these letters make?” Identify the correct sound for each letter.

Step 3

Point to each placeholder line in turn. Slide your finger along the lines and repeat “ssslllaaammm”, “slam”. Point to the first line and ask your students, “What sound do you hear?”

When they identify /s/, bring the letter <s> above the corresponding line, if students incorrectly identify the sound, repeat the process. Repeat for the remaining letters, asking students what sound they hear, which letter it corresponds to, and then moving it down to its place in the word.

Step 4

Point to each letter and have students say each phoneme one by one. Slide your finger along the bottom of the letters and have students read the word. Initially, they may need to say this with teacher support.

Step 5

Now we have discovered ‘slam’, let’s look at some more words. Repeat the process on the main board as a group with the words ‘trap’, ‘drag’, ‘sniff’, ‘smell’, ‘fuzz’.

Step 6

Now that we’re getting the hang of it, students can complete the task on their boards in conjunction with the main board for ‘swim’, ‘past’, ‘spot’, ‘plug’, ‘bust’, ‘well’, ‘buzz’, ‘dress’, ‘grab’, ‘slug’, ‘gruff’, ‘still’, ‘cross’.

Step 7

Now we are going to make some silly words, they are not real, but they will show me how well you can hear the phonemes: ‘blop’, ‘trup’, ‘pilm’, ‘strup’, ‘smed’, ‘pilt’, ‘yim’, ‘quox’.

Take Action: Word chains - CVC words

Step 1

“Great! Now we are going to practise making new words, some will be real words and some will be silly. Find the letter tiles <b> <u> <s> <t> and make the word bust.” Have students point to each letter and say each sound, then the whole word. At this stage, it is important that students point to each phoneme as they say it and to then slide their finger along as they say the word.

Tell students, “We are going to change the word bust into the word rust. buusst to rruusst, which sound do we need to change?”

Students identify /b/ “Yes, we need to change /b/. What sound do we need to change it to, buusst to rruusst? Yes, we need a /r/. Move /b/ and bring /r/ to replace it.

“Now point to each letter and say their sound, and then say the word” Model this with students, /r/ /u/ /s/ /t/, rust.

Step 2

“We changed bust into rust, well done. Now we are going to change rust (point to sounds as you say them) into the word trruusst, trust. Which sound do we need to replace?

Repeat the process as you did for bust to rust, say the new word, identify which sound is changing, identify which letter represents the new sound, and substitute it.

Repeat the process to make more new words:

bust→rust→trust→truss→fuss→fluss→fluff→flup→flip→flap→slap

→slip→slop→stop→step→sep→sap→cap→cat→bat→blat→blot→blit→blip

Take Action: Decoding - CVC and CCVC words

Step 1

Ask your students to look at Task 2 of the Student Worksheet and to read the words out loud.

You will need to tell students the words saw and lily at this stage. They have an irregular spelling pattern, and so are heart words.

Step 2

Ask your students to read the sentence on Task 3 of the Student Worksheet.

Learning Extension: Students can cut the individual words out and paste them in order to form the decodable sentence; you can have them copy the sentence or extend further by completing the task as a dictation.

These concepts should be revisited throughout the week before diving into the next lesson.

Reflection

Ask your students these comprehension questions:

Where is Fred sitting?
What does Fred see in the water?
What size is the fish?

Systematic Synthetic Phonics Instruction: Lesson 9

Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables

Systematic Synthetic Phonics Instruction: Lesson 9

Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables