Wednesday, October 12, 2016

What Does the Fox Say? Phoneme Blending Fun

At the beginning of the year, primary teachers feel very frustrated get lots of laughs when we work with students on blending sounds together to say a word. When we say the sounds /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/ students are supposed to hear and blend those sounds together and say frog...not MONKEY! Ha! I wrote about that here. :)

Students LOVE the song What Does the Fox Say? and I love having fun visitors come visit our room to help add a little engagement to our lessons. So, we had a visit from Mr. Fox. He brought us a package with several games to help us be successful at blending sounds together to read. Mr. Fox wrote us a letter explaining what he wanted us to learn.


Our first job was to practice just hearing sounds and blending them together. We practiced this skill playing Fox Talk Bingo. Students were given a game board and had to listen as I said the sounds in my mystery word. Students blended the sounds they heard together and covered the matching picture.



Our next activity was to practice blending the sounds in the sound boxes together. With these cards students pointed and said the sounds in each box and then used the arrow to help them quickly blend the sounds together to read the word. For kiddos that needed a little bit more support, I added the dots to some of the cards. After they read the word, they find the matching picture. :)

You can see Mr. Fox helping us. :)


Mr. Fox is also fast and wanted us to practice blending sounds together quickly. Students use a toy car to drive under the sounds. The students then drive the car faster as they blend the sounds together to say the word.

Another way we practiced blending sounds together was using these cards as transitions or time fillers. There are a variety of cards ranging from words with 3 phonemes up to words with 6 phonemes. Just say the sounds on the cards and the kiddos will tell you what the word is. :)

To see how well the kiddos have developed this skill, Mr. Fox made 2 different ways this skill can be assessed.
And of course we have to dance to the song at the end of these activities..several times! 

Tons of fun learning What Does the Fox Say? You can grab it from my store here.

From My Heart to Yours,
Heather