Jump from reading and writing words, to sentences and stories!

I have been having lots of fun lately with the children, writing and reading sentences. I am often frustrated at the point when children are ready to start reading small books, because it is often very difficult to pinpoint exactly what they are ready to read. If it is too hard or the book too long it isn't great for their confidence and requires a lot of help and attention from the teachers. This activity is fantastic because it can so easily be adjusted to their ability, is not too long and the time spent writing the sentence in between each turn reading gives me time to help some other children as well :) The writing part also gives them some practice at forming their letters, helps them to learn how to space words and use a capital and full stop. Furthermore it reinforces their reading skill and their knowledge of what a sentence is.

It all started when Jake and I were trapped in a large fort made of bed sheets one afternoon, dressed as Spiderman, and needing something to do that under no circumstances needed anyone to leave the fort...

I experimented with variations and saw that a lot of the children picked up that the words were the same on each line and remembered them well, when reading the following sentences. By starting very simply with a sheet that just had a few sight words and a few phonetic words the children were off and running, suddenly going from being able to read just short words to being able to read sentences with confidence!

Here was one that I did with someone who was confident reading short phonetic words, it introduced 'the' and 'a', but otherwise was not asking more than a bit of phonetic reading that the child easily did. They suddenly were reading not just words, but reading sentences, that made up
a story - so exciting! As she read the sentences I asked her what she thought it was and at the end we found out the answer to our little mystery!

The child that I worked with the sheet below is very confident with their phonetic reading and getting good at sight words, so we were doing lots of sight words here, again in a pretty repetitive way so that he quickly felt like he was a pro! I like to talk about silent 'e' and sing/ play the children this little song Silent E! whenever we are doing a word where it has an 'e' on the end. Again, after the repetitive sight words at the start of the sentence I end with a little phonetic word for him to sound out.

For the two girls that I did this next sheet with, we sat down and went through all the words with phonograms in them, before reading and writing the sentences. I told them that the 'a' and 'i' sounds in 'said' were always joining up to make an 'e' sound, and wrote an 'e' over it to help demonstrate. I quizzed them on some of the combination sounds they had worked on before like 'ow', 'oo' and 'ee', so that when they got to them they were fresh in their minds. We hunted for all the combinations we could find and underlined them as well for added reinforcement.

If your child is able to copy all the letters and is reading phonetically with confidence this is a great activity to take them to the next step and give them a big confidence boost. It is lots of fun if you can build a guessing game around it and don't forget to finish with some beautiful drawings because they are always so cute!