Phonics

The website splash learn is helpful for students to discover phonics in a fun way! In the games, there are fun ways the students can learn their letter/sound relationships, all the letters, rhymes, and sound blends. It has all sorts of phonics games, including uppercase/lowercase letters, learning letter sounds, and rhymes. These games allow students to enjoy learning on a fun interactive website!

In this lesson plan example, for phonics, there are multiple examples of resources and different lesson plans you could use in your classroom. They all emphasize phonics and include activities, materials, objectives, and assessments for these skills. This would be used when working on phonics with your students, probably closer to the beginning of the year for kindergarten specifically. However, these lesson plans should be all throughout the year and should constantly be reviewed. This site is valuable because it gives great examples of fun educational ways to work with your students on phonemic awareness, which is such a critical part of their knowledge.

This professional book resource, which we currently use in our class, is valuable for teaching phonics. It covers every detail of phonics, including what it is, when to teach it, ways to teach it, and more. This resource helps you understand what you need to teach, and if you need examples of different activities or lesson plans, you could incorporate phonics into it. It is a great resource for teachers to have when working on teaching phonics to younger elementary students.

The graphic organizer gives you multiple graphic organizers to use each week, and each week you would change them to a new letter or new section of phonics you are covering in your classroom. It also gives specific letters each week to focus on so that students have "letters of the week." This can be used at the beginning of the week to introduce to the students what the week's focus will be and should be used throughout the whole week as students continue to grow their knowledge and can continually be filling out the organizer. This graphic organizer is instructionally valuable because it allows students to continually be adding to it and growing their learning.

This YouTube playlist has 38 songs on the playlist, incorporating all different aspects of phonics. While not all of them are necessarily necessary, there are many songs that would be useful in the classroom. There are multiple overall phonics songs that sing about the letters and their sounds, and then there is a song for each individual letter and the sound it makes. These songs are responsive so that they can be played, and students will sing along with them. They are fun and upbeat, allowing students to want to listen to them and interact with them. This is instructional because it is a great transitioning piece and can be played while students are in transition from one activity to another. Another way to use these would be as the anticipatory set in a lesson to get students to start to think about the letter they will be focusing on for the lesson.