Jobs!
I do one letter per week with my kiddos too.They're really into Jack Hartmann's alphabet songs, so we do one each class and practice writing the letter in the air. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGZFmW3uPJESome games:Duck, duck, goose. Students say phonics as they tap other students on the head, then run on the target phonic of the week.Phonic flashcard walk. Lay flashcards down on the ground in a line. Students hop, crawl, jump, or dance from one to the other, saying the phonic as they go.Trainwreck. Students sit in chairs in a circle. Give out flashcards with phonics to each student, making sure to repeat each phonic 3-4 times between the whole class so many students have the same card. Remove one chair and have that student stand in the middle. The student in the middle looks at the card and says that phonic. All of the students who have the same phonic stay sitting. Everyone else has to change chairs. The student in the middle grabs a chair and the person without a chair becomes the one in the middle. Repeat.Make the phonic shape with your body. This can be fun individually or in pairs, but more than that and they start yelling at each other.Ring toss game. You can use an upside-down chair as the posts for students to throw the rings. Designate each leg as a specific phonic and say the sound when you throw the ring onto the leg, or respond correctly to a flashcard to get the chance to throw. Instructions here: http://www.learning4kids.net/2015/06/07/early-years-throwing-skills-game/Keep the balloon up in the air. Toss a blown-up balloon into the room and tell students not to let it touch the ground. Any time they touch it, they have to say the target phonic.Crab walk race. Divide students into two teams. Tape a phonic to each student's belly and have them crab walk race across the room (you may have to teach them how to crab walk) while their teammates chant the phonic. When they are across the room, the next person can go. The first team across wins.Same or different. Write a few phonics on the board. Point to one and say a phonic. If they match, the students stay standing. If they don't match, the students sit.I also try to do some kind of tactile activity for each letter, even if that's just giving out candy on 'C' day or fake feathers on 'F' day. I end class with the Alphabet Fun Pages by This Reading Mama. It's a mixture of connect-the-dots, mazes, coloring, tracing, and identifying a picture that starts with that phonic. Link: http://thisreadingmama.com/ While the students are working on this, I go around the room and check them individually on whether they know the name of the letter, the sound, and the picture that goes along with them. When they do it well, they get a sticker.
I'm teaching them the phonics song for each letter - Then we write the big/small letter in their notebooks a few times. After that, we go over the words they've learned via the phonics song for that particular letter - practice charades/pronunciation (depending on the game), and verbal translations. Finally, we play either chase the vocab/speed charades (check my ppts), or the speed speaking game (speed reading game which uses pics instead of words - again, check my ppts) using the new and old words we've learned. After we get to the letter E, I intend to start teaching them how to read words written with letters we've learned thus far. Keep in mind, most of my students can't even write in Korean yet, so it's going to be a real challenge ;)
