Teaching Ideas Sentences

Teaching Ideas for Sentences - Practising reading sentences (Phase 5a and 5b)

Phonics Learning Opportunities

To practise reading sentences.

Organisation

Whole class, small group or 1:1.

Teaching ideas

Spending a few minutes reading (or writing) sentences and captions should be an integral part of every daily phonics session. This interactive resource includes all the sentences from the daily plans for the phases they cover and will hopefully save lots of preparation time.

Click Show to reveal a sentence and ask the children to read the sentence. You can click on Hide to hide the sentence again. Read the sentence in a variety of ways:

Modelling - Model reading the sentence carefully. Pretend to get stuck on a particular word which relates to the learning objective. Show the children how you would sound talk this word and carefully blend it to work out what it says. Then go back and read the sentence from the start again. Model thinking about the sentence and asking yourself if it makes sense.

In Phase 5b, children are taught how to cope with graphemes in their reading that can have alternative pronunciations. E.g. for the i grapheme you might show the sentence "I find a pint of milk". Model the process of reading the sentence by trying out words with one pronunciation. E.g. you might read the word find as finned. Model pondering on this and deciding it doesn't sound right. Make the point that this isn't a big problem as you know that the i grapheme can also be pronounced as /igh/. Try reading the word again with this phoneme and think about whether the new pronunciation makes sense. Repeat with any other words that cause problems making sure that you keep going back to read the whole sentence and check that it makes sense.

Homophones make sense using more than one pronunciation e.g. wind, read, bow. With these words you will need to read the entire sentence twice - once with each pronunciation - and model reflecting on which pronunciation makes sense in the context of the sentence.

Pairs - Ask children to work in pairs to read the sentence to one another. You may need to make it a very clear expectation that when one child has read the sentence, the other must read it back to them. Ask pairs to give you a thumbs up when they have worked out the sentence and encourage them to think about whether it makes sense and what it means. Ask a pair to read the sentence out loud to the class or ask the whole class to read it out loud together. If the sentence is a question, discuss what the answer could be.

Individuals - Show the class a sentence and ask them all to work out what it says silently, in their heads. Give them enough time and ask children to give you a thumbs up when they have worked it out. Ask all children to read the sentence out loud together. Discuss whether it makes sense and if it is a question, what the answer is.

Variations

You can also use these sentences to help practise writing sentences. The children will need whiteboards or paper. Do not reveal the sentence to the children. Read the sentence aloud - you will find them on the daily plans. Ask the children to write the sentence on their whiteboards. Click on show and let the children check their own sentences. You will probably want to focus their marking on the words that relate to the day's learning objectives. Point to and say each letter in the word and ask the children to tick each letter that they got right and correct any mistakes that they have made.

Again it is important that you sometimes model writing these sentences. Talk through your thought processes and model carefully segmenting particular words and thinking about how to choose the right grapheme for each phoneme.

At times you may want children to write the sentences independently. At other times it may be helpful to get children writing sentences with a partner and talking thoughtfully about the choices they are making.

Tips

Don't forget applying. Along with revisiting it is very often dropped from the teaching sequence. This is usually becuase people either run out of time in the session. To make sure this doesn't happen, try putting time limits on the games in the revisiting, teaching and practising sections (use a clock, sand timer or computer timer). When your timer shows that the time is up, move onto the next section of the teaching sequence.

You need to train children to use the techniques they have learned in phonics sessions (blending, segmenting, alternative pronunciations etc) when reading or writing sentences. If you don't train the children, they are likely to use guessing as their method of choice for unfamiliar words.

Have very clear expectations that the children will use the skills they develop in the applying part of the phonics session whenever they read (or write) sentences in all curriculum areas.

When a child asks for help with reading or spelling a particular word, ask them to tell you any of the phonemes/graphemes that they already know before you step in to help. It can help to model this a lot and train children up to know what to say to ask for help. E.g I know these sounds are... Can you help me with this bit please? Ensure that children stick to this routine when they ask other children for help too.