Phase 3 - oo
The activities and games in this blog post can be adapted and used with any sound that your child is learning. Phase 3 sounds and words can be found on the sounds page.
Revisit
Set a one minute timer. I tend to use Alexa but you could use the timer on your phone. Place a selection of phase 3 sound cards on the table face up. Call out a sound and ask your child to point to it as fast as they can. Keep a tally of how many they get point to correctly. Keep going until the timer goes off. It doesn’t matter if you say the same sound a few times. Swap roles and play again. Who can get the highest score?
Reading:
This activity is basically noughts and crosses with a phonics spin. Introduce the oi phoneme and sound out the word coin (c-oi-n).
Draw a grid and add oi words. If you have any loose change give each player 6 of the same coin. Make sure you both have different coins. If you don’t have coins, use any suitable objects as counters.
Take it in turns to choose a space, read the word and place your coin on top. The winner is the first person to get three in a row.
Writing:
I was reluctant to share this activity because I like to share quick, simple and easy activities and this one has a bit of prep work to do first.
For the oi sound I wanted to join jigsaw pieces to make words. I thought about writing on the back of one of our puzzles but that meant I couldn’t just pick 3 puzzle pieces because they wouldn’t necessarily fit together. Instead I found these wooden puzzle pieces on Amazon but I’ve since spotted them on the Works website. I like them because you can join any of the pieces together to create a word.
I decided to spray them with chalkboard paint so we could reuse them because I thought they would be good for addition and subtraction sentences too. You could just write straight onto the wooden pieces with a pen though to make it quicker.
I wrote the letters needed to make some oi words. I asked Sophie if she could make a word and she had an absolute meltdown and stormed to her room! I remember posting in my stories on IG and getting so many “I’m glad it’s not just us” stories.
I knew that I needed to make it into a game to get Sophie engaged. So I made a list of words we could spell, set up a score board and left it out. When she calmed down I asked if she wanted to play game to see who could score the most points (p-oi-n-t-s) and she did!
We took it in turns to read a word off the list without showing the other person. Then they had to use the puzzle pieces to join the correct sounds together. We scored a point for each correct sound. Oi is a digraph, where two letters make one sound, so I wrote them on the same puzzle piece which was worth one point.
We also practiced some maths as we kept a running total of our scores.
I included some phase 4 words and Sophie was happy to have a go at spelling them
because they were longer which meant she scored more points.
To make this quicker to set up could play using the sound flashcards instead of puzzle pieces.
Here are some oi words that you could use.
Phase 3 words: oil, join, soil, foil, coin, coil, tinfoil.
Phase 4 words: point, joint, moist, joist, oink, spoil, spoi
If you have a go at any of these activities and share any photos on social media I would love to photos of them in action. Please tag @miniwritersclub and use #miniwritersclub and let me know how you get on.
Anna