Crosswords for phonics with young learners

 A recent activity with an elementary school-age group was an great success.

TY Naomi for the collage

The aim was to help them establish spelling rules for long vowel sounds/dipthongs - for themselves. Recognise a long sound in a word, isolate it, and build the word with other, "known", consonant sounds.

We had a cheat code or three up our sleeves - already gained confidence with an exercise last week sorting words into long vowel sound groups...and the splitting them (eg spelling with central ee or ea...same sound, and no clues other than remembering).

We used a printed copy of a wordwall crossword (each), and the appropriate phonics page open from a textbook on the table for 'reference', and also the digital version of the same puzzle on a screen we could all see. The beauty of a crossword approach like this is that students can pick off the easy ones they already know, and therefore later have some of the letters already in place for the less familiar words. Of course they can ask teacher "What's this?" as often as they like - and play with the pronunciation themselves to fine tune the vowel they're hearing/making. Teacher was the secretary with the keyboard, entering 'best guesses' (not always right, but no drama) while encouraging 'good guesses' maybe not too confidently tried.

Mistakes not penalised, but instead a team rethink and an ironing out of repeated spelling errors. And hey presto, we all enjoyed the challenge of completing a crossword in English, with so much repetition involved but nobody noticing. Drill baby drill!

Here is a link to a Japanese take on this class https://www.instagram.com/p/DfdhCNNyI9H/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&exln=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==&srtk=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==