End of the year ideas to solidify phonics skills

 I love the end of the school year.  The kids are broken in, most of the core material has been taught, and it's time to review and have some fun!

I teach systematic stuctured literacy lessons to students in small groups.  I find that eventhough the groups are small each student still has individual needs.  I usually find that there is a heart/trick/high frequency word that they are strugging to master or phonics skill that they need some more practice on.

The best way I have found to solidify skills that students are struggling with is to make it multisensory! My favorites are dough, shaving cream, and watercolors.  If you have never used watercolors in the classroom please give it a try!  They are inexpensive, the clean up is simple and students LOVE to use them.  It is a great way to spice up illustrating a story or doing a retell, but I use it mostly to watercolor words.  They can rainbow paint them on any paper,  or I like to use these worksheets that I made. 

The workseets have nine skills for each word which includes a simple search and find.

CLICK HERE IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE

Shaving cream is SOOOO fun for practicing words!  I use cookie sheets for easy clean up.  Also easy to take away if someone is not using it appropriately.

Dough is always a favorite, and great for fine motor development too!  Get each kid a container to use in May and then send them home with some activities to do over the summer!

All of these activities are perfect for non-decodable words as well as your science of reading based phonics words.  A great way to practice decoding and encoding words.

BUT... what about your kids that need some fluency practice?  Decodable books are the best fluency practice, but they can be expensive, and hard to manage.

I found games to be the best way to get kids reading more.  I love to use game cards with any board game or games like Pop the Pig.  Students have to read a word and then they get to "play" the game.  It's perfect for the end of the year when they want some more time to talk and interact with their friends.

I also made these phonics card games that are so easy to use.  I can group students based on phonic skill and have them play together in a small group.  These were such a hit over the years that I've added board games and 

sentence games too!

YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING HERE

Hope you find something useful here, and have a good end of the school year.  What do you like to do at the end of the year?  I'd love to hear from you!  Shoot me an email at 180daysofreading@gmail.com or send me a DM on Facebook!

Thanks for reading friends!

Amy