Following on from his Easter animal hunt, Cian was keen to write the names of the animals he’d found.
He hasn’t been particularly interested in reading or writing before, so we haven’t pushed it. But this last couple of weeks he has started sounding out words as we’re out and about and trying to spell them.
I gave him some sticky labels to write their names on.
Egg
e-G
As always, rather point out that there are two ‘g’s in egg, or that he’d written a capital ‘G’ rather than lower case, I let him write what he thought. I want him to build confidence with his early attempts at writing and be happy to just ‘have a go’.
Chick
Cian has only looked at individual letter sounds before. We’ve never looked at digraphs or ‘letter teams’.
Digraphs are collections of two letters that make one sound, e.g. rain, lie and wheel.
Cics was able to break the word into it’s phonemes, ch-i-ck.
He knew that you needed a ‘h’ to make a ‘ch‘ sound, but I helped him add a ‘c’.
When he read back that he had written, ch-i-e, he could hear that the sound at the end wasn’t right, so was able to change it to ch-i-c.
Cat
c-a-t
Goat
g-o-t
Rabbit
r-a-b-i-t
This started off as r-a-t, rat
Dog, Duck and Horse
He sounded these out as ‘d-o-g’, ‘d-u-c’ and ‘h-u-s’.
Goose
He surprised me with g-oo-s as I didn’t know he knew that digraph either.
Pig
p-i-g, pig. Cics wrote his ‘p’ upside down, so I gave him a new label. He suggested just turning the label upside down, so I asked him to finish writing ‘pig’ so he could see why that would have been tricky.
Hat and Hatch
Cian enjoyed making the eggs hatch over and over again.
Learning to sound out words is tiring. With it being his first attempts at writing today, I would have stopped after a few words. But as Cici likes to complete a task he’s set himself, there’s no stopping him once he’s started.
‘Hatch’ is quite tricky, so I asked him to listen for another word at the start. He identified ‘hat’ and was able to write it easily as h-a-t.
Turning ‘hat’ in to ‘hatch’
Lamb and Crack
He then went on to sound out ‘lamb’ as l-a-m and ‘crack’ as c-r-a-c.
Very proud of his writing.
Cian then chose to write over all the words in purple felt tip pen.
Literacy
ELG 10 – Writing:
Children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.
