Favorite Tools & Tips for Small Group Literacy Instruction // small group phonics in a K-2 classroom

hey everyone i have a fun and fast video for you today where i'm going to share five literacy tools i love to use in small groups if you've watched my videos before then welcome back and if not my name is susan jones i'm a former first grade and k-2 literacy teacher who now spends a lot of time here on youtube i'm actually getting my master's degree right now in curriculum and instruction from boston university so while i'm home doing that i like to hop here in front of the camera make quick actionable videos that you k through two teachers can take and use in your classrooms right away before i dive into this video i do want to preface it by saying you don't need any of these tools to use in your literacy groups but these are just ones that i have found and have used in the past and they tend to be high engagement for your young students and they're a lot of fun also i'm going to link each tool i mentioned down below in the description with amazon links i'm doing amazon because that's just the easiest place for me to find them and that is honestly where i've gotten all of these tools but if you can find them cheaper at the dollar spot at any dollar tree store anywhere drop it down in the comments ask some friends get them however you'd like alright so let's get started give this video a like subscribe to my channel and let's roll good luck with that i'm leaving it okay up first the tool i use probably the most in small group literacy are these magnet letters now you can use any magnet letters i particularly like these ones right here they are alpha magnets and i like them because the vowels are all red and the consonants are all blue i just find it's easier for students to go ahead and especially if we're doing like cvc words or vc words if they're looking for that vowel or if they're looking for that consonant i like having them color coded like this but any letter magnets will do you can use letter magnets for a variety of things i particularly like to use them when we're just having students match the grapheme to the phoneme so i might have them match some letter sounds like here i might say which letter makes the sound ah which letter makes the sound which letter makes the sound and as you can see students will just simply pull down the letter tile or show you the letter tile that matches and then put it back up of course while you're doing this you can also have students spell words you can say spell the word mat using the tiles that you have in front of you and students can go ahead and spell the different words along those same lines i like having students practice word ladders to help them with phony manipulation so they might spell that word matt and then i might ask them okay change that beginning sound to this sound and they'll have to look at their letters and see which one that would do and then they'd say that made the word cat and then i might ask them okay how can i change the word k at to cap and they would have to then figure out that they have to change the end phoneme change that t to a p there are just so many different centers and activities that you can do with students using these letter tiles so if you don't have any in your classroom you might think about finding some for your students to use the second tool i love to use in small literacy groups are whisper phones now you've probably seen whisper phones all over the place i know that many teachers will have students use them in independent reading so they'll have them in their little book bins maybe or if they're at a small group and they're just whispering um but not only do i love them for fluency but i also really like them for phoneme awareness so first of all you can have students practice making letter sounds the same way you would have them practice their fluency by whispering into the phone but it's a great way for them to practice their letter sound so you might say please say the sound that the letter t makes and they'll take their phone and they'll listen to themselves say these cheap little phones are so silly but kids absolutely love them my own two boys have their own whisper phone upstairs and it's a great way for them to actually hear themselves reading and it just gives them a lot of joy another way i like to use these are i will have students come over to the group grab their little whisper phones and we will start with some phonemic awareness drills just to warm up before we go into our small group lesson so i might have students use this for phoneme segmentation or phoneme blending or phoneme isolation so i might ask them to segment the word mop and they would whisper or i'd ask them to blend these sounds and they would say tap and whisper it in the whisper phones are nice to use in small group because you can still practice those same skills with all of your students but you can kind of listen into each of them independently just to see if they know what they're doing tools number three and four i'm going to use together because i like to use them for making your activities more multi-sensory now i talked about why using different sensory activities are great for teaching sight words in this video and i also talked about it for teaching letter names and sounds in this video so some of the tools that i like to use for this include these little finger lights here they go on like this and off but you can get a whole pack really cheap this has like 24 of them or something for your whole classroom um for like five dollars maybe they're very cheap but i love to use these for a few different reasons students simply put their little finger in there and then they can turn the light on i won't keep it on to not blind you the whole time but what you can have students do if they are reading a text in front of you these are great for tracking the words so they can track each word as they say it if they are blending sounds to make a word they can do the same things they could say at cat and they can highlight the different letters and sounds as they read those words another activity i like to do with these little finger lights that i mentioned in both of those other videos include actually physically making the letters or the high frequency words that you are working on so you can either turn off all the lights which might not work if you're in a small group with a bunch of other kids in the class but when i was a literacy specialist uh we would have our own room and so you could actually turn off the lights and do this in there and they would simply turn it on and either trace on the wall or up on the ceiling they could actually make the letters but if you are doing it in a small group and you can't turn the lights off you can simply grab like black construction paper or any solid paper and they can you could say make the letter or show me the letter that makes the sound and they can go ahead and trace a b it's just a fun way for them to practice those letter names letter sounds and really any literacy skill tool number four which follows in this same exact category are these sensory poppers now i have started to see these everywhere over the last couple years again i got mine on amazon and these will be linked below but i have seen them at target i've seen them at some dollar stores and these are just a lot of fun for students to go ahead and pop they're called fidget toys generally because it's just a simple way for them to if they need to keep moving or they need some sensory output but for literacy groups you can use these in a similar way that you use plato using these are pretty simple you can see here that there are three dots on the top and then there's five and then there's six and you can have students choose a row and you might want to have them do something like phoneme mapping so let's say we're working on the digraph ch and how it makes ch what i will have students do is i might have them go ahead and segment some words and normally while you could do this with play-doh you can also do it with this little popper and so i might ask them to segment the word chop what sounds do you hear in chop and students would say and then i like how students can see that those three are indented because you press them next they can choose another line and i might ask them to segment the word couch this time that digraphs on the end but i still want to see if they can tell me the sounds they hear in couch so here they have ow [Music] couch again just like using play-doh this provides a nice tactile option for students to use and it also provides that visual of letting them see how many phonemes are in a word after they've gone ahead and pressed the little poppers okay and the fifth tool i love to use in small literacy groups are these dry erase dice now if you have been watching my channel for a long time you will know that my very first year on youtube what i would do is i would just share one quick game that you could use in your classroom every single sunday so the videos were between four and eight minutes long maybe and you can see in the thumbnails that i have these dice in many of them that's because as i explained in those videos i love using these in small groups because they are dry erase you can quickly customize them to whatever skill you're working on with your small group of students now these ones in particular look like this it comes with four of them and they are three inches by three inches all around and the quality of these ones are really really nice the white boards it doesn't just erase right off it doesn't get all scuffed up there are plenty of dry erase cubes out there that you can go ahead and find i just really enjoy the quality of these ones now you can go back and actually watch any of those older videos to see some of the games i would use with these dice but for some literacy ideas off the top of my head one i would like to do would be basically complete a word let's pretend you're working on cbc words and that is how this dice was set up and so this die has all of the vowels a e i o u and it even has a star which means wild and what you would do is on your small group white board you would write m you know dash like an empty space t or c space p just a bunch of cvc words and i would try to find ones that could really be uh completed with more than one vowel and so i'd probably write about 10 of them up on the board and students in your small group would roll this vowel die and then see what it landed on you and you could either have students go ahead and fill in uh you could have them go in order and fill it in and tell us if it is a real or nonsense word or you can have students look at this medial vowel you and see which word up there they could fill it in with and then once that was filled in it would be like complete students would just pass the dice around and you tried to complete all the words on the board this die was already set up for an activity if you were working on the digraph ch you would just write that on the board and you might tell them that students will roll the die and they will try to say the full word so this will be the ending right this will be the rhyme and the onset will be ch and students will have to blend it to make the words this would be chop there's chip there's chess there's chick you get it of course you could also just throw on some of the letters or sounds you are reviewing students can roll them look at the letters and see if they can make that sound there are really an endless number of ways you can use these dice in your small literacy groups so there you have five fun tools i love using in small group literacy and like i mentioned at the beginning of this video you don't need any of these these are just hopefully i can just spark some ideas that you might be able to find in your own classroom or find in a cheaper way i am not telling you to go on amazon and purchase all these but like i said i linked them down below in case you did want to check any of them out all that being said it was difficult to narrow it down to just five little teaching tools that i like to use in small groups so now i want to know from you what types of fun little tools do you like to use in your own classroom and tell us how you use them leave it down in the comments below so we can check it out and hopefully we can learn from one another and maybe again spark some new ideas to use in the upcoming year as always i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up so i know make sure you're subscribed to my channel and click that bell that way you're notified of every new video see you in the next one [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Susan Jones Teaching

Views: 21,963

Rating: 4.9251103 out of 5

Keywords: small group literacy instruction, literacy teacher tools, tools for small group literacy, classroom toys, classroom literacy supplies, kindergarten literacy centers, kindergarten literacy activities, first grade literacy, first grade literacy centers, second grade literacy, favorite literacy tools, susan jones teaching, science of reading

Id: T7Z3Y5IGS08

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021