Making words is a great foundation for developing phonemic
awareness. The interactive aspect of the activity really gets students involved
and there are so many words that can be made! Constantly using this activity in
the classroom ensures that students will have a lot of experience discovering
sound-letter relationships and recognizing patterns in words. It is good to
start using the making words lesson early and increase the difficulty of the words
as students’ progress in their word knowledge. The Cunningham and Cunningham
article, “Making Words: Enhancing the invented spelling-decoding connection,”
also mentions using Making Big Words lessons for students who are in the intermediate-grades.
This shows that making words can be easily modified to fit the students’ needs.
Making words can be a really fun way to become familiar with
how our alphabet works. Teachers can also add their own unique techniques to
the Making Words lesson. In the video featured below, a kindergarten teacher
enhances the activity by incorporating “jolly phonics actions” to a Making
Words lesson. The students are actively engaged and easily identify which
action and sound they need to produce when they see each word.
- What would you add to a Making Words lesson to make it even more interactive?
I think that video was a great demonstration of getting the students involved in the making words lesson. They were into the activity and all participating in the movements and sounds.
ReplyDeleteI think another great way to incorporate interaction is to do teams or pairs. This may not work so great for the early stages, like kindergarten. The students can feed off of each other in groups and even get ideas they may not have thought of on their own. It is a great way to build off of each other.