March Themed Phonics Activities
- Transform Your Teaching
- Mar 15, 2023
- 6 min read
Since creating a Teachergram, we have always been in awe with how organized and flawless other teachers kept their reading and math stations. Their pictures and videos always looked so fresh and clean! It seemed that all the stations were labeled and stacked neatly with themed materials and were updated with new monthly themed goodies and perfectly laminated cards every month! We could talk about insta-worthy classrooms for days, but the real question is….How did they do it?
Basic answer; Time and organization. Something we all wish we had more of, am I right!? As former first grade teachers, we will be the first to admit, it was a challenge to keep up with everything in the classroom. Like our own pictures would show, our stations would start out cute and clean, but by the end of the month needed a facelift. We found one quick and easy injection, if you will, to keep the stations fresh, and that is by regularly changing out the Phonics activities at the Phonics station! Not to mention, all while staying within our budget! Now, that is something to talk about!
Teaching the lower grades meant making sure our stations were engaging, purposeful, differentiated, and explicit. This meant that a lot of time and planning went into our reading stations! We spent the beginning of the year training the students how it looked, how to act, learn, and what it sounded like at each station. We practiced transitions, working with partners and in groups, getting the teachers attention, and more.
Our reading stations were usually based off of these 5 categories:
Reading Comprehension
Vocabulary
Fluency
Phonemic awareness/decoding and phonics
Spelling and Writing/ handwriting
While we won’t get into detail with all of them today, they all play an important role in creating reading stations in the classroom and should not be overlooked. Throughout the years, we learned how important it was to provide stations that offered opportunity for hands-on, active learning. These hands-on activities ended up being the most coveted and engaging stations in the classroom and we could see the students independently start to differentiate based on what they chose!
We found that the Phonics station was the easiest way for us to incorporate hands-on opportunities because Phonics instruction itself lends to a more multi-sensory teaching approach. The techniques we used to teach phonics already included using manipulatives, hand- gestures, and speaking and auditory cues. Therefore, using manipulatives in the phonics station seemed like a good fit.
We chose a few ways that students could practice their Phonics specifically through phonological awareness, encoding, decoding, and manipulating morphemes.
These included:
- Students manipulating sounds with letter tiles and/or letter patterns.
- Students using sound boxes to segment the individual phonemes they hear within a word or syllable.
- Students writing/matching the grapheme and phoneme using different mediums.
- Students creating like words with phoneme/spelling patterns.
- Students organizing spelling around the vowel letters.
- Students dividing and decoding words by syllable patterns.
- Students identifying irregular parts of words.
- Students identifying morphemes and writing the meaning.
We want to preface the use of these phonics activities by saying that we did not implement them until AFTER our class had mastered the multi-sensory approach in conjunction with explicit, sequential, systematic, and cumulative whole-group instruction. We spent weeks practicing these multi-sensory activities as a class before putting them in place as stations. This ensured that the students knew the purpose, meaning, and expectation of each activity.
Additionally, on Monday’s, we would introduce the Phonics skill and practice the specific words they were going to use in their stations by modeling manipulation and encoding and decoding of each word.
That all being said, before using these in your Phonics Station, make sure to explicitly model, teach, and practice these activities before having students do them independently.
So, let’s finally get into it! How did we make these activities for the Phonics station in an affordable way?
First things first, order some good containers or buckets! We got ours from dollar tree because we wanted them to be green and small, but we found some awesome ones on Amazon (linked in our storefront). These are necessary because once you make the station in that tub or bucket, you can label it and store it. We suggest that you label big bins for each school month and keep these monthly phonics stations, as well as, monthly books, worksheets, transformations, themes and everything else in them! That will help keep you organized for the next year. The containers should be the most pricey of this process. You want to choose containers that aren’t too bulky, spacious, easy to store, and accessible.
After you have your buckets and bins, we chose 4 mediums that can be moved and manipulated. We would definitely advise you to look at your local Dollar Tree first. They usually advertise the monthly theme and have so many tiny objects you can use for a very reasonable price! The next place to look is obviously Amazon. But don’t overthink it! Think tiny erasers, pom-poms, glitter and sprinkles. Think cheap, easy, cute and affordable manipulatives. You want to look for various sizes, colors, and textures so you can choose to use them in numerous ways.
For the month of March, we tried to choose mediums that were Saint Patrick’s day colors to keep the kids motivated and engaged in our classroom theme! The kids love seeing the manipulatives change from month to month. Now, here’s how we set them up and used them:
For the video, you can see we demonstrated all the phonics stations with the word “luck.” In the classroom, the students either received a written phonics word list or had an iPad or chrome book with a list of pre-made words that they could click on to hear and write or make. The students can choose any of the activities in the Phonics station to practice their phonics words. This allows students to differentiate their practice and take ownership of their activity.
Our first phonics activity that we modeled and taught and was perhaps the easiest, was using sprinkles as the medium in a Ziploc bag to act as our specific phonics activity. The students would use the iPad or chrome book and it would say the phoneme for the students to hear and the students would then write the grapheme in the sprinkles.
If the students wanted something more intricate, they could choose from the “gem trace” activity or the “letter beading activity.” Both activities involved spelling the word and finding patterns in the word. The students could find the phonics pattern and identify it by circling it, making it all one color or bead, or show it by putting it in groups.
The activities that focused on phonological awareness was done by manipulating or moving the clover and/or gold “chips” into sound boxes. Moving these” chips” into boxes (we drew the boxes on whiteboards, but you can use El’ Konin boxes) is a visual way for students to segment the individual phonemes they hear within a word or syllable. The students would listen for the word on their iPad or Chrome book and then would move the clover “chip” into a box representing a sound without a vowel, and the gold “chip” into a box representing a sound with a vowel. We would scaffold using non-letter” chips” to emulate the same activity of phoneme deletion and substitution practiced within our whole-group instruction.
The pom-poms were used in a similar way. However, it had more steps and was intended for our more advanced phonics students. The students had to first write the word and then move the pom-poms on top of the letters to represent the phonemes in the word. This was different in the fact that the number of letters would not match the number of pom-poms. Manipulating and moving these sounds simultaneously engages visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities.
The most complex station for our advanced encoding and decoding activity was the” letter board” activity. The students are to write and or spell the phonics words given on the letter board. They can use the colors on the rainbow board to sort the words, find patterns, and identify syllable types. You can also buy different colored letters to encode and decode words by color and differentiate vowels, specific phonemes, and or syllable types.
These activities were easy to make, easy to keep organized, and were cheap! All the materials we used are linked in our Amazon storefront for a one stop shop if you are short on time! We found that these stations could be incorporated throughout the year and were easy to change up! Whether you decide to use these phonics activities for one month, or for the whole year, we would love to know what you think! We are always on the look-out for phonics activities and would love to hear your feedback and things that have worked for you.
Anyways, we hope this is helpful and we can’t wait to continue to share more!
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