I think that the best thing about having to teach first grade this year is that I get to do more phonics activities and crafts with these younger students. I love finding ways to integrate it into whatever I’m teaching. My latest pet project has been all about reinforcing phonics with fun craft activities.
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Phonics Activities and Crafts
So far we have done the long and short vowel sounds. For the long ā sound and silent e, we made a flower vase craft to showcase long ā words. We brainstormed a list of long ā words and each child chose their own words from our list to feature in their craft. I decided to use a flower hole-punch to make it cute for my students.
They loved it. If you do not have a pattern hole punch, you can use layered circles instead.
This is the hole punch I used for the flower petals. Isn’t it cute or what? I topped them off with circles from my regular hole puncher.
While I was doing this, I realized that I could use this craft idea for ‘ai’ words as well; an ‘ai’ pail perhaps?
Long ē words were next. We divided the long ē words into three categories:
- the long ē words from silent e, for example, names like Pete, Bede, Steve and Eve.
- the doubled e words, example, see, bee, tree, eel and seed.
- and the single end e long ē words, for example, me, we, he, she and be.
These are pictures of the doubled e long ē words that we did with an apple tree display. Click on the pictures or here to download a free template of the tree-tops that you can print out on green paper. My students did theirs in their books which were on a much smaller scale than my demo poster.
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(Please forgive their little spelling errors!)
Each item you see above is:
- A stack of tree trunks made by slicing up a folded sheet of brown paper with a guillotine. That took only a minute.
- Tufts of grass clipped off of a strip of green paper with a border punch or a zig-zag cut scissors.
- Tree tops printed and cut out on green card stock.
- A small pack of foam apple stickers in different colors.
Moving along to the long ‘i’ words… we brainstormed our word list and chose ‘kite’ as the focus. All of the other long ‘i’ words were attached to the kite. This poster below is my demo poster.
For phonics activities that you can use with your students, check out this blog post about how to make learning fun with hands-on reading and spelling activities.
See related phonics blog posts here:
GH and GHT Phonics Word Wheels
Hands-on spelling and reading activities
Free CH Word Wheel with foldable worksheet
