Do you ever feel like there are never enough hours in the day to create/source all the resources you would like to provide for your learners?
When I was a class teacher, I certainly did..
Having said that, there were a number of things I did produce in my own time which turned out to be ‘game changers’ – the best, most effective phonics resources.
Read on to see if these resources could be ‘game changers’ for you too…
#1. Back in the early noughties, a number of my Reception children were struggling to remember the sound when I showed them a letter. There were also issues with incorrect letter formation. What could I create that would solve both these issues?
Grapheme mnemonics.
What a difference they made and over 20 years later, they are now helping children across the country who find these things difficult. This early years leader from Bournemouth said:
‘….really improved letter formation and handwriting across the lower school.’
#2. During a short break from teaching a couple of years later, I spent time investigating when different graphemes were used to represent particular phonemes and discovered that this was often linked to either their position in a word or the letters occurring immediately before or after. How could I present that information in a way that would help KS1 children make sensible grapheme choices when spelling?
‘Best Bet Train Cards’, which clearly show which graphemes to use for a phoneme and when.
The feedback from a trial school was really positive, but it was few years until I could test them out with a Y1 class of my own and I was delighted to see how easily children took to using them as a spelling aid.
20 years on they are continuing to support children with spelling phonetically regular words. A phonics leader in BANES commented:
‘Children respond really well to these and they’ve definitely made a difference to their spelling.’
#3. A few years later, I started using the new Letters and Sounds programme and wanted to ensure that lessons were fun and engaging for my Reception children. But it was really difficult to do this with the limited word lists in the back of the programme handbook.
As some of you already know, I spent time reading the pocket Oxford dictionary and creating more detailed word lists for the programme whilst soaking up the sun on holiday (sad I know!). This then made it so much easier to create those enjoyable activities for inside and outside phonics lessons.
Almost 20 years on, I am still using these spelling lists (now updated) to create resources for Lesley Clarke’s Letters and Sounds (DfE validated phonics programme) and if I was still in the classoom, I would be using them to compose engaging sentences for dictation in line with guidance in the writing framework.
#4. Early in the 2010s my assessment data showed that too many of my Y1 class were not able to recognise many of the Phase 5a graphemes by the end of the Phase. What could I do about that?
Could grapheme mnemonics be the answer in the same way they had been when I taught in Reception?
I set about combining the single letter mnemonics to create stories that would help children recall the sound when shown a Phase 5a digraph.
Bingo! I could hear children muttering the stories under their breath to help them when I was assessing which graphemes they could recognise. I asked them whether the stories helped them and the answer was ‘Oh yes!’
My digraph mnemonics are very different to those produced by other programmes (many of which also don’t provide these beyond Reception). They are designed to help children talk themselves through how to recall the sound when faced with the grapheme.
But…
There were 2 more resources I knew I wanted and needed, but which I didn’t find the time to create until after I’d left the classroom.
#5. I could see from my half termly assessment of tricky words that whilst many children could spell certain words correctly, hardly any of them could spell some of the other words. Why was that?
Effective spelling mnemonics
The words I had effective mnemonics for were being spelled correctly by far more children than those I did not have effective mnemonics for. But I simply didn’t have to rectify this whilst working as class teacher.
Having left the classroom, I finished creating effective mnemonics for all the LaS tricky words (and the Y2 homophones) and these have proved very successful across the country. A Y1 teacher in Southall commented:
'The tricky word mnemonics have been a huge success in my current and previous class! I've found that the children who are normally behind with their learning are spelling those words correctly!‘
#6. The decodable texts we had at school for our youngest readers simply didn’t meet their needs. The sentences were too long, there was no repetition, the language was far from natural and some of the words were not appopriate for children with speech and language difficulties.
Why couldn’t we have early reading books which were decodable, but with more natural language and repetition (as we had had previously in non decodable texts, which had proved very successful)?
If I wanted them, I’d have to create them myself, but how could I do this without being a publisher?
Decodable poems!
This idea came from the grandparent of a child I taught in the late 90s. She was a published poet herself (Julie Holder) and in the early days of me teaching synthetic phonics, she offered to write a set of poems for the class, each focusing on a particular sound. Obviously things have changed a lot in the world of phonics teaching since then, but the idea of writing fully decodable poems has turned out to be a good one.
Don’t panic – they are poems in the broadest sense of the word. They are easy for the children to read and help build confidence. As an EYFS leader in Shopshire commented:
‘These are wonderful resources…….. Lesley's poems have made a significant difference to the fluency in our Reception cohort.’
So if you are experiencing any of the challenges I had with phonics teaching over the years, you can carry on wishing you had the time to create your own solutions or you can try the ‘game changing’ resources I’ve mentioned above.