Virtual Teaching Resource Hub

Instructional Activities

The instructional activities found in the links below are designed to promote the development of strong foundational literacy skills.  Which ones you select will be determined by the following factors:

Click here for a glossary of terms used in the activities.

Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness, or the ability to notice and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language, is an essential building block for later decoding skills.  The activities below are designed to promote the development of various phonemic awareness skills.

Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences

As children are developing early literacy skills, they begin to associate the phonemes (speech sounds) they hear with the graphemes (letters and letter combinations) they see.  The activities in this section are designed to strengthen students’ phoneme-grapheme associations.

When teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondences, it’s important to model a pronunciation of each sound that can be used when blending sounds to make words.  This video provides a demonstration of blendable pronunciations of the most common sound for each letter.

The order in which you introduce new phoneme-grapheme correspondences should follow your school’s scope and sequence for foundational skills in reading.  If your school doesn’t have a scope and sequence, click here to download ours.

 

Decoding and Encoding

Once children learn some phoneme-grapheme correspondences, they can begin decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words.  The activities included in this section are designed to help children apply their phoneme-grapheme knowledge to decoding and/or encoding.

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Irregular and High Frequency Words
The graphemes listed here include consonant combinations with silent letters, double letters that often appear at the end of words, and trigraphs (three letters combined to make one sound). These activities help students develop familiarity with other graphemes.

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Connected Text
When a vowel is followed by an R, the sound of the vowel often changes and is said to be controlled by the vowel.  There are three main r-controlled vowel sounds:  the /ar/ sound, as in barn; the /or/ sound, as in corn; and the /er/ sound, as in fern, bird, and curl.  The activities in this section are designed to build students’ proficiency with r-controlled vowels.