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Teaching Ideas for using Dragon's Den - Practising Blending for Reading (p60)
Blend to read each word and decide whether the word is real or fake.
Phonics Learning Opportunities
To practise blending for reading.
To motivate children to read words.
NB. Using fake words ensures that children have to learn to blend and not just recognise words by sight. Some children are very good at recognising words and it can be a useful early strategy. However, as children get older and need to be able to read more and more words they will find it increasingly tricky to learn them all by sight.
Organisation
Whole class, small group or 1:1.
Once children are familiar with the game, they could play it independently.
Teaching ideas
You will be given the chance to choose exactly which GPCs will be included in the words that will appear in the game. These match the suggested words in Letters and Sounds for teaching each new GPC and set of GPCs. Alternatively, you could choose a general mixture of words from each phase for revision purposes.
Click to get a new egg.
Model sound talking each sound in the word and then blending the sounds together and saying the final word. Ask the whole class to repeat this with you as you point to each sound.
Ask the children to decide whether the word is real or fake. Make sure they all give an opinion and don't sit passively. The easiest way to do this is to ask them all to give an action (e.g. thumbs up/down, point to the appropriate dragon or get them to suggest some other suitable actions along the dragon theme.
For subsequent words, ask the children to sound talk and blend the words. It works quite well to ask individual children to do this and then get the whole class to repeat the sound talking and the blended word. If the initial child struggles to blend the word, ask other members of the class if they can help out.
Again, ask the children to decide whether the word is real or fake.
Extensions
Please remember these are just ideas. You know your children best and can adapt this game in anyway you like to help them learn to blend.
Letters and Sounds has instructions for a small group, hands on version of Buried Treasure (see p 60). Dragon's Den is an alternative version of Buried Treasure so you can use these instructions to play a hands on version on Dragon's Den. It is vital that children get lots of this type of hands on practise to back up any whole class work. Resources for this small group game can be found below.
Paper Resources (Word)