Week 4: interactive Whiteboard and Phonics

This session was very beneficial for the Early Years and Key Stage 1 classroom as it gave us ideas how to teach phonics by making use of the IWB. Essentially,the teaching of phonics involves the matching of sounds (phonemes) with letters or a combination of letters (graphemes) such as /ee/ /ea/ /ay/ /ai/, by a process of blending and segmenting which is commonly known as ‘synthetic phonics’. As soon as children learn to familiarise themselves with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), they will be able to de-code written words into sounds and encode verbal language into written language. Obviously, teachers can use different techniques and activities to inculcate these basic ideas, but outcome should be the same. The point to be noted is that blending and segmenting are reversible processes. There are 6 phases of phonics, but I won't be going into too much details in this blog.

By using the magic box, I thought it would be a good idea to teach children about the letter 's' and check if they can recognise it with everyday objects. As you can see in the picture, I have added a magic box at the bottom and all the objects that start with letter 's', when dragged down, will be hidden behind the box whilst those which don't, will lie on top of it. In order to achieve this, I clicked on the objects and changed the order settings of each of them. It is great activity as it not only raises awareness of the 's' letter but at the same time it enables the students on practicing on sounding out the words.

Akilah.....