Halloween Literacy Activities
So if you know us well, you know that we LOVE all things fall. As you can probably guess we were so excited to be able to throw some Halloween activities into our mix. Most of the students we work with really struggle with phonological awareness and while we have phonological awareness built into our lessons we know that some of our students need extra practice with it. So we have some fun phonological awareness practice activities for you.
This activity is meant to support syllable segmenting, phoneme segmenting, spelling, and written work. Here's why:
To be a good speller, a student needs to be able to break big words into smaller chunks. To do that the first step would be dividing a word like pumpkin into syllables. Pump-Kin. Next, the student needs to be able to break each syllable into individual sounds. /P/ /u/ /m/ /p/ and /k/ /i/ /n/. Before a student can pair letters to each of these sounds they need to simply be able to break the word into its smallest pieces by sound. That's the goal of phonemic awareness (no letters necessary).
However, we also find that it's really important that students make this connection. So when creating these Elkonin boxes we created some of the boxes to match the number of sounds.
You can use this phonological awareness activity in two ways:
1. If you have students that are really struggling to learn how to segment start here so they can start to understand how to break the words down.
2. If you have students doing well with phonemic awareness use these boxes to have the student begin to pair the letter or letter group to the sound. This turns your phonemic awareness activity into a spelling activity.
Finally, we included a writing activity that helps students begin to put together appropriate syntax in their sentences: who/what, did what, why/how/when. For struggling readers and writers, we often see that because there is so much struggle at the single-word level we forget that writing is an incredibly complex task that requires phonological awareness, sound-to-letter pairing, syntax, and semantics. By scaffolding these activities in this way you work from the most basic writing task (spelling - which requires an understanding of how words break apart) to the most complex task (putting together a syntactically correct sentence).
For more engaging activities, that help to target all 5 core components, of literacy, check out our TPT store by using the button below and check out interactive games in our Boom Learning Store >>here<<.