Spring brings sun and rainThis activity and learning aid can help beginner students memorize the pronunciation of English letters. I learned about it in the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching on Future Learn platform. It took me a year to push this up on my list of priorities, so here it is: I created it in Canva, If you wish to have the original size (A3 poster), leave a comment, and I'll send it to you.
I wrote about it in a previous post, but I'll repeat the principle here: A is gray, B is green, and so on. The idea is to remember the vowel of the color - that's the vowel we need to say the letter. R is a star! This activity also teaches rhyme, which is another aspect of language production and sound processing that students with Dyslexia struggle with. You can have the whole class working on creating their own Alphabet Rainbow, which may be more effective than just showing them your own. I found this extremely useful for my students, who already have different names of letters memorized because of French. The most problematic letters are: G/J, K/Q, R, A/E/I, X, and Y. Note that this rainbow is made for the American English. In the British Rainbow Z is RED.
0 Comments
Touch it, grab it, feel it, move it
In the spirit of multi-sensory approach, I have bought and created a few versions of the alphabet, which I intend to use in the classroom. Perhaps even with non-beginners, if I find a suitable activity to blend them in.
A former colleague of mine gave me the Banana Wild Tiles and a set of magnetic cards. The first one is quite small, but I coloured the vowel tiles in various patterns, while the magnetic ones are quite big. However, the animals they feature have nothing to do with the letters, so I'm afraid it could lead to confusion with certain students. Some time ago, I managed to find the letter-shape magnets, both capitals and lowercase. They come in their own stencils, which turned out to be even more useful than the fragile cardboard-like sets
In my own hand-made production, I came up with two simple and cheap ideas. I bought inexpensive no-brand-name building blocks and wrote the letters on the sides.
The second one required more time, but I think the end result is quite attractive. I've had the 'swimming noodle' at home for a long time. I use it as shoulder support in massage and for some exercises. So, I sliced it in 1.5 cm thick discs, which came out a perfect size for the above mentioned stencils. I had cut out the vowels from some fabric paper earlier, but couldn't come up with a surface to stick the letters to. I was thinking about buying tiles or linoleum, but it seemed like a too ambitious project. In the moment of leisure, I had an epiphany: the spongy noodle would be the perfect material for my alphabet. One 1-meter noodle costs about 3 euros. I figure I could make about four sets from one. I used both sides of the disc, and I created four vowels each. They are light, almost indestructible, but still big enough not to get lost easily. And easily replaceable if lost or damaged. In the end, I traced some glitter glue along the letters. It will give them texture and sparkle!
![]() To help your students navigate those first few months of confusing English grapheme-phoneme correlation, create a simple colour-coded poster to explain the most typical examples. If you have a chance to make it multi-textured, like a collage, it's even better! I used the alphabet arc as the foundation. The big letters are the ones with one-to-one correspondence. The colour coding follows a strategy I learned at the Future Learn Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching Course and it links the vowel in the name of the letter with the colour that carries the same vowel, e.g. A is gray B is green F is red I is white O is yellow Q is blue So the only one without its colour is R (they use black, but technically it's not the same vowel), so I used the rhyme R is a star - it's golden colour, and there is a small sparkling star in it. A lot of Moroccan students mix A, E, and I, then G and J, and they keep saying H, X, Y and R in the french way. So, I hope this trick will help them learn the names of the letters better. However, even more important is to teach them how to read certain sounds. So, the two posters below deal with the 'unpredictable' letters. Needless to say, these are not all to be presented to the students at once, and some words should be 'unraveled' at a later stage (follow the Orton-Gillingham phonemic progression chart). You can cover the potentially confusing word with a post-it, to keep their attention on the words and sounds you are covering at the moment. |
AuthorMartina Matejaš is a teacher of English and Yoga. She is keen on understanding the mind-body connection as well as cracking the 'code' of thoughts-emotions-behaviour matrix. Archives
April 2022
Categories
All
|