Rationale for the above activities
These two spheres of instruction follow the researched ideals in many ways. First and foremost, whole group and small group instruction provide six exposures to direct instruction. Furthermore, each exposure to direct instruction sheds new light on a way to study and understand the targeted phonics skill.
Multiple practices played its role most largely in the small group settings. This way, students were able to practice the strategies taught in direct instruction immediately after learning them. In small group instruction, the five days of multiple practices were organized to be scaffolded with practice formats that gradually prepare students to be able to spell words on their own. The Multiple Practices page also shows independent practice students got with phonics spelling practice.
Lastly, direct feedback played a large role throughout small and whole group instruction. Small group seemed to lend itself best to direct feedback because I could assess on an individual level, as well as aid in understanding in the exact moment students may have been struggling with a specific phonics spelling pattern.
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How were Small Group Activities chosen?
OOPS: A fun game we played at the beginning of each day of small group instruction. Popsicle sticks with words containing the targeted phonics pattern written on them were in a cup. Students drew a stick and if they could read the word correctly they got to keep the card. If couldn't read it, they put the stick back. If they drew an "oops" stick, all their sticks went back in the cup.
Word Sort: We kept word sort worksheets all week to add the OOPS words and other words into the sorted categories as we encountered them in our readings.
Highlighting Words: Students sorted the popsicle sticks into categories based on the phonics spelling pattern for the week On the same word sort worksheets, students were asked to highlight the part of each word that made the targeted sound. This was great for students to see the location of the highlighted sound in the word and correlate that to which spelling pattern to use based on the location of the sound in the word. As a teacher this was great to see if students were able to break down the words into different sounds and isolate the letters required to make that sound.
Elkonin Boxes: Elkonin boxes are an organization pattern for breaking apart and sorting sounds in words. Each box has one sound in it. For example, the word "fear" would have three boxes. One for the "f" sound, one for the "ea" sound, and one for the "r" sound. Again, this requires breaking down a word.
Picture Cards: In this activity, students saw pictures of objects or words containing the phonics sound. They sorted them based on the spelling pattern for the phonics sound. This was the first day students hadn't seen printed words to sort, so they were transitioning to being able to spell the words on their own.
Magnetic Letters: This was the final practice and students spelled words with the phonics target sound without any sort hints or other prompting.
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