Phonics Warm Up Activities

In this blog post, were talking all about the phonics warm up portion of lesson planning.

A warm up drill (or sometimes called a Three Part Drill) is the portion of your lesson where you review previously taught sounds and letters in multiple ways to help students identify sounds and spellings while continuously working on important skills. We are going to break out warm up drill down into three different sections: the visual drill, the blending drill, and the auditory drill.

Visual Drill

The visual drill works on a students ability to look at a grapheme (a letter or letters that represent a sound) and quickly recall the sound it represents. During this drill the teacher will show students a card with a grapheme and students will simply say the sound that matches. If a grapheme can represent more than one sound students will give each sound. Here are a few key points to remember during this drill:

1. Only review sounds during this time that have been explicitly taught already.

2. If students have trouble with a grapheme, stop and say the grapheme, the sound it represents, and have students repeat you. If students had trouble remembering sh you would say “This is sh. Sh represents the /sh/ sound. What sound does sh represent?” and students would answer “/sh/”.

3. Place the cards down in a cvc word order. This means beginning sounds will be placed first, followed by the vowel sounds, followed by ending sounds. This will help you to prepare for the next step of our warm up drills.

Blending Drill

The blending drill works on a students ability to see the grapheme, say the sound, and blend those sounds together to make a word. The cards should already be laid out in the correct order, but if they aren’t you will want to separate them by beginning sounds, medial vowel sounds, and ending sounds. Show students the three top cards. Point to the first card and have students give the sound. Then repeat that process with card number two and three. Once the sounds have been given run your finger across the top of each card, starting at the first card and ending at the final card. While you are running your finger across the top of the cards students are blending the sounds together to read the word that is shown. Once the word shown has been read pick one card to remove. Once the card is removed it will show a new grapheme to replace it. Repeat thr process of segmenting and blending for each card in each pile. Here are a few key points to remember during this drill:

1. If students have trouble with a grapheme, give them the grapheme and the sound, ask them to repeat, then try to read the word again.
2. Stick the troublesome card back in the pile to review again during that day’s blending drill.
3. If there is a grapheme students are having difficulty mastering you may keep that card in the word for quite a while. If students are having trouble with the consonant letter y, keep y on the blending board and remove either the vowel or ending sound a couple times. This give students multiple words using the tricky letter.
4. Preview words before flipping the cards. Sometimes, because of the random order, letters will be ordered to spell an inappropriate word. If this happens you can either choose to move a different card or grab a card from behind and pull it forward.
5. You can have students identify real and nonsense words when they appear through a thumbs up or special signal for nonsense words. It is perfectly okay and beneficial to use nonsense words in this activity!

If you want to see the three part drill in action, check out these two videos linked below!

C and K Rule on the Blending BoardEvery Day Warm Up

Auditory Drill

The auditory drill works on a students ability to hear a sound and connect it to the correct grapheme representation. The teacher will give a sound and students will repeat the sound and say which grapheme(s) represent that sound. Students will also point to, grab, or write the grapheme(s) while they talk. Here are a few key points to remember during this drill:

1. If a sound has more than one representation (that has been taught) we want students to identify them all. Once c, k, and ck have been taught we want students to say “c spells /k/, k spells /k/, and ck spells /k/” while pointing, grabbing, or writing.
2. The main goal is for students to be writing as they say the representations. If a student does not need the scaffold of pointing it is better for them to connect the phoneme, grapheme, and formation together.
3. This is a great place to bring in the tactile sense by tracing in sand, in shaving cream, or on sandpaper letters.

This warm up drill works best when it is apart of each phonics lesson each day. As new skills are introduced you will want to add to the card deck and the sounds you ask students to spell.

If you watched the “Everyday Routine” video above, you saw that I have five activities I complete every day to warm up. These activities are important, but do not have to be completed every day or during this time; so, that is why I am separating these activities for the others.

Word Mapping

We will touch on phoneme grapheme mapping in a later email more in depth, but the point of this activity is to connect sounds to graphemes in a way that directly relates to how the brain learns and stores words. Our brain knows that dog is represented with a d, then o, then g and that the d represents the /d/ sound, o represent /o/, and g represents /g/. Phoneme grapheme mapping shows the relationships between phonemes and graphemes and helps us connect the sounds to their representations in the correct order. This is different than just simply spelling a word because we segment, or break apart, the sounds of the word and write one grapheme at a time for each of the sounds. For the word dog, I would say “The word we want to spell is dog. Tap the sounds with me.” And together we would say “/d/ /o/ /g/ dog”. Then I would ask how many sounds we heard and mark off that many boxes in our phoneme grapheme chart. Next, I would go through each individual sound and ask students to repeat the sound plus give the representations for the sound. Once all of the representations have been written we will spell one time through while rewriting.

I complete a phoneme grapheme mapping review during calendar every day. We practice tapping and spelling words that contain sounds and spellings we have previously learned. This keeps students actively spelling and dictating previously learned skills without having to take away spelling time from my phonics lesson to review. When we spell during our lesson we can focus on words with the focus phoneme grapheme pair.

Vowel Intensive

The final piece to the review puzzle is the vowel intensive! The vowel intensive is a way to give students more exposure to the short vowel sounds. The short vowel sounds are produced with very little change in mouth position. This makes them very easy to confuse. The vowel intensive, in its most basic form, has students identify the vowel sound they hear spoken by the teacher and which grapheme is used to represent it. Students will need each of the vowels in front of them, whether it be on index cards, popsicle stick (see video above), or magnetic letters. Only the vowels will be shown at this time.

The teacher will give a word and the students will hold up the letter that represents the vowel sound they heard, either in isolation or in the spoken word. This review time can start with simply giving vowel sounds and making the connection in isolation, then later building to identifying the sound in vc and cvc words like at, cat, in, on, and nut.

Once students have mastered their short vowel sounds this activity is not necessary to complete. If you have a select few who are still mistaking their vowel sounds it may be a better use of classroom time to move the intensive to their small group/on-on-one time.

And there you have it! Four warm/review drill activities to promote a continuous review of previously taught skills in a fun and multisensory way. Each of these drills connects directly to how our brain learns to read, and gives students multiple exposures to that previously learned content.

Curious about the other steps in planning a phonics lesson? Check out my blog post here!

Questions about how to implement these drills? Comment below and I’d love to answer more in-depth questions tailored to your classroom!

Make sure to follow me on Instagram at Hughes Heart for First for more tips and tricks to implement in your structured literacy classroom.