I am so excited about a new phonics program that we are trying out this year. Last year Mrs. Motley and I went to a workshop to learn about Intensive Phonics from Reading Horizons. We were so eager to bring it back and try it out. We only got to use it half a year last year so I am very interested to see the progress students make using it from the beginning of the year. For the first few weeks we will be reviewing letter names and their sounds. The alphabet is divided in to five letter groups. One vowel and four consonants. We worked on group one last week. We will only talk about short vowels sounds first.
Group 1: a, b, f, d, g
Group 2: e, h, j, l, m
Group 3: o, n, p, r, s
Group 4: u, t, v, w, x, y
Group 5: i, z, q, c, k
In the first letter group we learn to take a consonant and a vowel and put them together to make a slide: ba, fa, da, ga, once the students know the sound of the slide we add another letter to make a word. So for example with the slide ba we can add a g at the end. ba-g to make the word bag. We sound out the word ba-g instead of b-a-g. We can change the g to a d and now we have the word ba-d bad. Then we move on the the next slide and do the same thing. We also work with nonsense words. Those are words that are not real. When students can read nonsense words then we can tell that they truly know the letter sounds.
We learned some rules this week for words:
1. All words have a beginning and ending sound. Most words have a beginning, middle, and ending sound.
2. All words have a vowel.
This week we will work with the second letter group using the vowel e. Now we can build on the letters that we already know ( a, b, f, d, g) and add more to form more words.
