Hands on Phonics, and Spelling

My plans in the area of Phonics here in the beginning of the year was to revisit Progressive Phonics for a little recap. However Selena’s ideas were not the same as mine. Quickly bored with revisiting what she had already learned she turned to these to show me a thing or two. I love it when she becomes the teacher.

She has been making words left and right with her new magnet letters. Keeping that in mind yesterday when we were discussing the power of h and the many letter blends it forms in words such as SH, TH, CH etc. I drew Selena’s attention to her letters and asked her how many words she could think of that started or had these letter blends in them. She listed so many off the top of her head, but then I pushed a little harder and asked how many she could spell. Now Selena is not happy with spelling little words anymore and pushes herself to spell as long of words as she can. I did however, ask her to keep to some simple words at first. It wasn’t long though before she was off onto spelling Cheese, and then out of the blue she asked about the letter Q, “Why doesn’t the letter Q ever stand alone? What letter does it stand with?” We answered her questions with the one word that came to her mind Queen.

I again brought her attention back to my lesson plan, and the word Show. I wanted to get more SH words from her, but she quickly informed me that she could make the word Shower out of Show by adding an R at the end. I stopped her and moved the R over and asked her what letter she needed to finish turning Show into Shower. She thought about it for a minute and grabbed the E from Queen and finished the word.

Selena then informed me, “I love school, we not only have math buddies, but now I have spelling buddies too!”