Week 4

This week at Thumbs Up group...................

Groups One and Two have learning about 'loud' and 'quiet' speech sounds.  For example, the sounds made by the letters B, D and V are 'loud' sounds and you can feel them in your throat.  The sounds made by the letters P, T, and F are 'quiet' sounds that we make at the front of our mouth.

                                

Group 3 have been splitting words into sounds - we call this segmenting.  They played a lotto game where you take turns to find a picture that matches with your card, then you have to find all the sounds in your word before you get to keep the card.  The game took a REALLY long time to finish, but we had fun!

     It has been another busy week for the three Thumbs Up groups.  Group one practised listening for words in sentences a few more times, then moved on to listening to the syllables within words.  We clapped out the syllables in our names  then moved on to clapping lots of words and using counters to see how many syllables the words had.  We found that MON-KEY has two syllables, BUT-TER-FLY has three syllables and CAR has just one.   Next week we will be playing a syllables snakes and ladders game.


     Group two have been listening for rhyming words again.  They have played match-up games and done some colouring activities to practise identifying rhyming sounds.  Next week they will be moving on to generating their own rhymes with some rhyme story telling....... WATCH THIS SPACE!


     Group three had fun this week with "Metal Mike".  Mrs Wallwork said some sounds and the children took it in turns to blend the sounds together into words.  If the students got the word right they were allowed to 'feed' the picture card into Metal Mike's mouth.  He loved eating the B-O-X but not the B-U-G !!

Term 4 has begun!

All three Thumbs Up groups met this week.  As most of the students are new to our phonological awareness groups we started by talking about skills that are important for us to learn - speaking and listening.  We discussed how important it is to hear and say the sounds in words so that we can learn to read and write well.


Group one had fun playing with musical instruments.  We copied each other's rhythm and used the instruments to give instructions.  It was fun to listen for bells, claps and whistles that told us to walk, stop and jump.  Now we had practised being good listeners, we listened to Mrs Wallwork telling a story and then we rang a bell once for every word we heard in a sentence.  Everyone was REALLY good and we gave each other a big thumbs up!


Group two used the instruments to practice listening and following instructions too.  Then we listened to a rhyming story and stood up whenever we heard a rhyme. That was fun!  We were so good that we played a game of rhyme lotto.  Grace was the winner, we all gave her a thumbs up.


Group three looked at lots of pictures of words made up of 2 or 3 letter sounds (phonemes).  We found the beginning sounds, the ending sounds and some of us even found the middle sounds.  We found the sounds in 'easy' words like D-O-G and C-A-T, then we moved on to harder words like SH-E-D and CH-I-CK.  Finally we looked at some tricky words like L-A-M-P and D-R-U-M.  Everyone tried really hard!  Next time we will be thinking about 'blends' like BR, BR, CL.