Teaching Ideas

I'm in my first year as well and have a prep class with 25 children.. very full on! I too have used flash cards to introduce my kids to the letters and sounds.

I also incorporate some of the great alphabet songs on youtube in to my lessons on a daily basis and have found that the fun and interactive style of this learning has improved fluency/ recognition of not only my middle-high kids but also my lower groups.

I always ensure there are always lots of alphabet/ sound consolidation activities in literacy rotation groups including; alphabet bingo, alphabet soup (dishing the letters out and drawing as many corresponding items as they can think of that start with that initial sound, snap, alphabet path games, sound cups (cups marked with initial sounds and a whole tonne of matching pictures where the children need to guess the initial sound of the picture).

My first term was pretty tough too and a real learning curve, but the penny is really starting to drop. Hope this helps!

Hi, it's my second year in prep but been teaching 15 years. Done lots of year one and multi-age all the way to year 7.
I have 28 kiddies this year....
All the kiddies know the 26 sounds of the alphabet, the letter names and digraphs as well as copy cat y.
How did I do this?
Flash cards 6 times a day for about 3 or 4 mins a time. I use the Jolly Phonics actions and started the year with the Letterland characters (which the kids choose not to use anymore).
The kids LOVE the flash cards! As I hold up a letter I say, 'what's the letter?' they respond 'r', I say,'what's the sound?' they respond with the action and the sound 'rrrr'.
Sounds a bit boring but the kids really do love it. It gives them automatic knowledge very, very quickly and before you know it, they are sounding out cvc words on their own.
:o)

I would be looking at doing PHONEMIC AWARENESS before moving onto the phonics and graphophonic side of things. A great site is the Florida Centre for Reading Research (http://www.fcrr.org/).
Click on Student Centre Activities.....
Then use some standard games (bingo/ dominoes/ concentration/snap) to reinforce skills etc

Have fun....

How exciting only having 8 students! My first class had 5, which is quite scary.

I use the Jolly Phonics actions when talking about words with children. I also use Soundwaves with my older students and have started introducing this to my younger ones.

Some other things I like to do with my little people is sound sorts. Have a box full of objects that start with similar sounds children often confuse, such as /m/ and /n/, /d/ and /t/, /b/ and /p/, etc. Get chn to identify the starting sounds and use the action to reinforce the sounds.

Once the chn are confident with first sounds, I do a magazine search. I give chn a specific sound we are focusing on and they have to cut pictures from magazines. For some chn I rip pages out for them to limit the distractions of this lesson, hehe! We glue them onto A3 sheets of paper and label them to create a dictionary we can refer to later on.

I also teach sounds together such as /c/, /k/, /q/ and /xs/, rather than teaching them separately.

There is so much you can do with phonics that isn't worksheet related.

Something else I highly recommend is 'A Sound Way' by Love & Reilly. Heaps of great games to make up and keep and also an interactive CD which is great to use as an activity on a smartboard.

Have fun! :)

Instead of kiddies, how about a focus on dogs?
There are a wide range of roles and jobs dogs have in the community. Where do the kiddies see dogs? How can they help rescue or shelter dogs? Where do dogs appear? Who breeds them? How are they treated? How are they trained? Where does their food come from? How can they safely greet a dog? Who helps dogs? etc. All parts of the community come together. A great book to read is "A Dog's Life" by Ann Martin. It is about a stray dog and the various places and people she meets during her life. Eventually she is rescued by an old lady.

What about having the class collect photos of themselves with different members or elements of their community - local police/fire men/women, outside the town hall etc... talk about what these people do and how important they are in the community, have them write a thank you letter to them for their service to the community - or even at the end of the unit have a morning tea where u invite them and have the kiddies award them a certificate of appreciation etc