Finn (4 years old) was keen to do some jigsaws with his little brother (17 months) to support Cian’s farm animal obsession.

Resources

Method

The first image is the activity Finn had already set up for Cian. All I did was add some magnetic letters to the tray, so Finn had the option of including a phonics activity.

Finn asked Cian, “Where is the pig toy? Well done! What sound does a pig make? That’s right, now can you find the pig jigsaw pieces?” Cian needed support joining the jigsaws together, so Finn helped him, then added the letters for ‘pig’ above.

These were Finn’s independent spellings. He spelt them all phonetically and some words were easy to spell correctly, e.g. ‘dog’ and ‘pig’. Some words needed him to apply some of the letter teams, e.g. for ‘cow’ he knew the ‘ow’ sound. Some spellings were incorrect but phonetically plausible, e.g. ‘sheep’ he wrote ‘syEp’ with a capital ‘E’. He explained that he had used a capital letter in the middle of the word because he thought that a lower case ‘e’ you would say ‘eh’, but a capital ‘E’ you say as ‘ee’.

I didn’t correct any of his spellings, other than asking if Finn could spot the letter reversals (in the video below).

DfES Early Learning Goals (2017)

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.