Practising the day’s new phoneme and grapheme as well as revising previously taught letters works perfectly with the quiz show format and can consolidate word comprehension as well. It turns out that phonics is entirely suitable to provide light entertainment in the form of game shows you can really let yourself go here – some teachers even have props to accompany their quiz master persona. I’ve even seen a teacher use a little theatre style box model, where she drew back the curtains to show the grapheme. It can also be made a bit more dramatic by revealing objects ahead of the phoneme to see if the children can hear the same phoneme in the objects, eg a coat, a goat and soap before the /oa/ is displayed. This is telling the children that learning new phonemes is exciting and something to look forward to. It can be as simple as a box or a hat from which a new grapheme is pulled – with an accompanying drum roll, of course. This conveys excitement and anticipation to the class. Some of the best lessons have what I call a ‘ta-da!’ moment. Phonics is 15 to 20 minutes to unleash your inner performer! I try to keep in mind that teaching and acting have quite a lot in common both are performances of a kind and many actors and entertainers were former teachers (Sting, Sylvester Stallone and Hugh Jackman were all teachers before they found fame of another kind). With phonics, however, it can be very easy to slip into a dull routine because you’re covering the same subject every day. When I was doing teacher training (many years ago) my tutor said that whilst a child might not remember exactly what they were taught, they would always remember the content best if it was delivered in an engaging and exciting way. You can start to collect activities that you know your class enjoys and then reuse them with different phonemes and graphemes. Phonics is structured to use that love of routine, which makes planning easier as you don’t need to do drastically different things each week. Teachers are in the fortunate position that pupils like routine they like to know what is going to happen next and how a lesson will pan out. If you have fun and enjoy exploring words and spellings, you can’t help passing on that enthusiasm to the children you teach. You might not believe me when I say phonics is fun, but it is, both for the teacher and the children.
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