Once the Little Mr. could easily spell words using their basic sounds, I moved onto more complicated spellings of sounds. Technically these are called digraphs and trigraphs, but I never used the words "digraph" and "trigraph" with my toddlers - I focused on what sounds they spelled instead.
There are sounds that can be spelled multiple ways, as well as spellings that can be pronounced multiple different ways; both of which were the focus of future lessons. For this lesson, I focused on how to spell sounds that were spelled just one way (for the most part).
Mini lesson: Introduce words with sounds made by a combination of 2-3 letters.
DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONE REACHED:
For just spelling: Knows letter sounds, can respond with a letter name rather than the letter sound when you ask them to spell a word, can easily spell 4-6 letter words
For spelling and writing - above spelling milestones PLUS: can write individual letters
DURATION: 4-6 minutes
MATERIALS USED:
Pencil and paper (or whiteboard and whiteboard marker) if you want your child to write the words they spell
OR: letter magnets/toys to spell the word
Spell longer words with sounds made up of 2-3 letters.
Certain sounds are made by a combination of 2 or 3 letters, so in the back of my son's spelling notebook (where he was practicing writing the words he was spelling), I created a "silly sounds" page where I wrote down each new sound as I introduced it. For example, when I first introduced the "sh" sound, I wrote the following down on his "silly sounds" page that we could refer to later:
s h _ _
_ _ s h
And I said, "If a word has the "sh" sound, you spell the "sh" sound with the letters "s" and "h" next to each other." Or I would say, "If a word has the "sh" sound, you spell it like this," and I would either point to or write out the spelling while he was watching.
These 5-minute activities were structured the same way as these in Part 1: I wrote down the letters as he spelled each word, and then he traced the dotted lines and / or wrote the word by himself on the line next to the word.
Spend at least three 5-minute activities on each sound (so that's at least 3 days if you're doing one 5-minute activity per day), asking them to spell at least 3 different words that use the sound you're teaching (along with using the one sound of each letter that your child is already familiar with). Only move onto teaching a new sound once your child has mastered the current one.
Every 5 new sounds or so, go back and do a "review" activity where you go over the sounds you've already learned and practice spelling words using those sounds.
Once they've been introduced to several different spellings of sounds (eg. "sh" and "ar"), if you find words that use multiple spellings of sounds, eg. "sharp", you can ask your child to spell that as one of their three words for the day.
Sounds made up of 2-3 letters, and some words you can use:
When I first started this activity I hadn't planned the order that I introduced the sounds, but I've come up with a better order of teaching it below that I plan to use with Copycat. If you introduce them in this order, some of the later words will combine the sound being taught with a sound taught previously.
Sounds made of 2 letters:
"sh":
fish, mash, shot, ship
shelf, brush
"ck":
black, snack, clock, click, shock, crack, track
rocket
"th":
this, that, with, bath
them
thick
"nk":
sink, dunk, honk
think, stink, thank
"ar":
car
part, hard
shark, start, sharp
"ch":
chop, much, char, chip
chess, lunch, catch, chunk
scratch
Sounds made of 3 letters:
"all":
ball, wall
small, stall
"ing", "ang", "ung", and "ong":
wing, bang, song, lung, fang
thing, cling, stung, swung
strong, clang
thinking
"air":
air
fair, lair, hair
stair, chair
Next in this "Teach toddlers spelling (and writing)" series, I started teaching more complex patterns of spellings: Part 3 works on spelling with the silent "e" and the soft "c"!
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