Phonics and Literacy through Arts & Crafts

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Phonics and Literacy through Arts and Crafts Spice up reading and writing activities!

Phonics and teaching English In the UK, students in lower primary are systematically taught phonics: how to learn letters by sounds and sound combinations. When teaching English as a foreign language, teachers can use phonics at any level in order to reinforce the pronunciation of certain words and students’ reading skills in general.

Students who are introduced to phonics tend not to make the typical pronunciation mistakes when reading that other learners of English make. ➜ Phonics Flashcards

Engage your students in making alphabet flashcards. On one side they print or paint the letter in upper and lower cases. On the other side, they draw words beginning with the letter sound (the phoneme).

Letter A, for example, could include a picture of an apple, an ant or an alligator but not an aeroplane, Australia or an aunty as the pronunciation of A in the latter is not the same as the letter sound. Make two copies of each flashcard and play Noisy Letters.

➜ Noisy Letters*

habet flashcards

alp 1 Hand out r students. Give the

to you ts. same letter to two studen

2 The students read what is on

their card and then give it back to you.

walk om around the ro eme repeating the phon card until e th on ted en repres with the n they find the perso . em th as same sound

3 Tell your learners to saying and

4 When they find the person they get into pairs and try to the recall words on the alphabet flashcard.

*Activity taken from The National Literacy Strategy Phonics. Progression in Phonics: Materials for whole-class teaching, Department for Education and Skills, UK, 2000

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➜ Phoneme Fans*

A phoneme fan is a series of letters printed on strips of card. They are simple and fun to make.

You can make phoneme fans with your students.

Invent different colours and designs with the letters you want to use (e.g. n, g, t).

d,

1 Say a word out lou ’. for example ‘sun

2 Write the first 2 letters on the board and ask the learners what sound goes at the end.

told you, ask

3 When they have‘n’ looks like by them what an opriate holding up the appr e fan. em on letter on the ph

Activity tip Here are some suggested words for Phone Fans Say game: fun, run, bin, win, log, jog, dog, frog, hot, pot, not, hit, sit, fit, bat, cat, fat, hat, etc.

*Activity taken from The National Literacy Strategy Phonics. Progression in Phonics: Materials for whole-class teaching, Department for Education and Skills, UK, 2000 98

➜ My Sounds Book

To help connect sounds and spelling, make a sound book with your students. Decide which words and sounds to start with according to your own teaching criteria, but take into consideration that high frequency words are always useful. For example, the phoneme sound ‘two’ could include the following words on the page entry: kangaroo, boot, shoe, new, blue, drew, through. Always underline the sound so that learners connect sound and spelling. Help your learners illustrate their books by drawing pictures or cutting them out of magazines.

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Phonics and Literacy through Arts and Crafts

➜ Rhyming Words

Improve students’ pronunciation by teaching them rhyming words. Technically, a word that rhymes has exactly the same sound at the end but a different stem or initial letters. For instance, tree, sea, monkey and me all rhyme even though the end spelling is different in each case.

➜ Mini-books

a worksheet

pare 1 First precon tains text boxes

which the of simple sentences from d. rea l wil you ry sto

2 When students listen to the story (for the second time), they put the story in the correct order by writing a number in the corner of the text box.

Suggested activity The Rhyming Tree 1. Design a tree which has groups of rhyming words hanging from its branches.

2. Students can then write sentences to include words from the same branch.

3. A sentence must be grammatically correct, but not necessarily contextual or make great sense.

For example: A monkey is in the tree with me looking at the sea.

the text

3 Then they cut outht em into a

boxes and stick folded in booklet. A4 pages gether are to d ple half and sta st. ple the sim

4 Students illustrate their mini-

4. Illustrate the sentences with pictures.

Reading and Story Activities ➜ Illustrations

Illustrations are an ideal way of linking Literacy with Arts and Crafts.

• Students can illustrate characters from a story book and write a summary of their likes and dislikes, physical descriptions or personalities.

• Alternatively, different groups can illustrate a scene from the text and write a line or two of accompanying text (depending on their level).

• Learners can design alternative cover illustrations and titles. They could make up a new front cover for the story book and these can be put together for a collective display.

book and make a display.

➜ Story Mobiles

Having read a story to your class, students make a hanging mobile to depict the story.

1 Divide the story into parts and give each group a different section.

2 The learners read this section again and design a mobile accordingly.

4 Finally, pupils tell their part of the story to the rest of the class.

3 The mobile can contain elements such as characters, objects, emotions and landscapes.

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➜ Shared writing

➜ Art postcard collections

Shared writing involves the teacher and students composing a coherent text together. The teacher writes and provides the structure or support for learner’s language and ideas. In this way our learners can see the process of writing (thinking of ideas, putting those ideas into sentences and then constructing a text) modelled for them. Hopefully, they will absorb the mechanics of this process for future individual writing tasks.

Art postcards can be found in museums, bookshops, stationary stores and as greetings cards. They are a useful teaching resource and an aesthetic complement to any classroom.

Try to collect a variety of postcards of different artists, styles and art periods and create a table display. Allow students to pick them up and study them in detail. Experiment with some of the following shared writing activities always brainstorming the vocabulary pupils might need beforehand.

➜ Painting self-portraits

It is fun to copy the style of an artist (Picasso, Van Gogh, Dali) having studied the painter or after a visit to a museum. Make a wall display of the portraits and select a simple shared writing activity to do with them. Provide the following gap fill (structure).

This is me I have got

eyes and

I have got a My face is

hair.

mouth and a

nose.

.

We are alike We both have

and

.

© EDELVIVES Photocopiable sheet

Guess who?

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This person has He/she has a Who is it?

eyes and mouth and a

hair. nose.

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Expressing opinions I (don’t) like this picture because it’s .

Expressing emotions This picture makes me feel

because .

Comparing These pictures are similar because .

Contrasting These pictures are different because .

Describing a memory This picture reminds me of .

Describing a scene In this picture I can see .

This picture was painted by in This artist was

(artist) year. (description).

© EDELVIVES Photocopiable sheet

Giving facts

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