Classroom Activities - Little Kids Archive

English Teaching Materials, Games and Activities

Alphabet slam is a fun activity for children. I used to play it with flash cards held onto the board with magnets, but magnets go flying and cards fall to the floor. So I made some Alphabet Slam Concertina Cards which don't fall off the board. Here is one way of playing: call out the sound, children slam the letter, then word whilst calling out "/a/ apple". Call out the word, children slam the word, then letter whilst calling out "apple /a/" or whatever your target was. Flash a picture or letter, children slam letter then picture (or vice versa) whilst calling out the letter sound and picture. Of course, if your students are using the alphabet, then they can be calling out the letter names, but I always focus on the sounds. Children enjoy taking over from the teacher.

Let's take a look at the materials needed for this activity.

This is the Alphabet Slam Cover. It will hang over the back of your board and keep the other cards in place when they are slammed; usually with fly swatters. Sorry to hear about your stiff neck. The cards are on their sides so that the will fit on the page and maintain a high definition.

This is the first of three Alphabet Slam Cards. If you want to give to try, then save the pictures to disk, print them out and laminate them. Join them together in a column, with the Alphabet Slam Cover Card at the top. Use wide band Sellotape (cellophane tape) to join them together leaving about five centimetres space between each card. Put the tape down the sides of the cards, front and back. The cards fold into a concertina for easy storage.

And the last one.

If your board is too high for the children or there is no way to get the Cover Card over the top of the board, then play the game on the floor or carpet using fingers instead of fly swatters, but watch out for overexuberant children. You can have four children to each concertina. One keeps score, three points sees a change in players in my classroom, another calls out the letter sounds or words and the other two play. It doesn't have to be played competitively, I find the whole class can enjoy the activity together when using fingers instead of swatters, and I would advise against focusing on the 'winner'.

After we have played this game, which reviews and consolidates letter recognition, letter sounds and vocabulary, I like to give the children a worksheet to do. If it's the first time they have had such a worksheet, then we will probably do it in class, but if not, then homework is an option.

The worksheet is called "FO1/2 Listen and Draw A" and is based on a similar activity page found in New Finding Out 1 by David Paul. The worksheet is taken from the workbook Blending a Hand Concept Worksheets 1 by David Lisgo (Oh! That's me!).

Here's the worksheet.

In my class I would expect my students to make a mental linkage between the activity and worksheet, but if your students are not making the linkage, then you could display the Alphabet Slam Concertina Cards and I'm sure they would get it. They still have to do some thinking on their own as in most cases the letters next to the pictures don't match.

Happy slamming!

I have a large, 105cms x 135cms Judy Instructo "Learning About Telling Time Play Mat", which I have used for teaching stroke order and letter formation. The children love it and it adds spice to what could be a boring activity, but only one child can use it at a time so sometimes it becomes, what I'm trying to avoid, "a boring activity". Still, let's not give up. A clockface can be very useful for teaching stroke order, most of the rounded parts of the letters of the alphabet start or finish at the 2, 4, 8 or 10 o'clock positions and some reading and writing schemes use a
clock extensively in the teaching of letter formation. These schemes usually give quite precise oral instructions for forming the letters.

Giving each child a play mat is not an option. It costs too much money, the mats seem to give off toxic fumes, and there are problems with storage and how much space they need when in use. So, after years of thinking about it, I finally got round to designing and creating a simple and inexpensive clockface to use for teaching stroke order and letter formation. Let me show it to you.

Now how can we use this? I printed out a large A3 sized clockface for myself and several A4 sized ones for my students. If you need a high-definition copy of the clockface or any of the materials in my column, then contact me and I will send you a copy via e-mail. Laminate the clockfaces and give one to each of your students, then give visual and oral instructions and have the children trace out the letters on their own clock faces with their fingers. In other words, talk them through the tracing of individual letters. Show a picture card and have the children write the associated lowercase/uppercase letter, with a water-based marker, onto their clock faces. Show a letter and have them write it on their own clockfaces. Have them clean the materials and play again. Put the children in pairs and they challenge each other to write (trace) different letters, with their fingers, "write this letter", "write a big /a/ (or 'A' if your children use alphabet names)". Bring their attention to the arrowed alphabet if their stroke order is 'far out'.

If you have other ideas on how to use the clockface, then please let me know.

Now might be a good time to give your students a letter formation worksheets. I made this first one for a friend who wanted a worksheet in lowercase letters only. Young children can easily lose their place on a worksheet, so I put in a second full line of tracing letters.

The second worksheet is taken from Blending a Hand disk 1. A teacher wrote to me and was concerned about having the anchor word printed on the worksheet, he was worried that his students would start sight reading these words. This is why you will not find any words on this series of worksheets. I tried to make them as graphically interesting as possible for young children. Most children enjoy completing these worksheets and they also enjoy colouring them after they have done the tracing.

Here's another simple activity related to letter formation. Say that we want the children to form the capital letter 'B'. Give them a copy of the letter and a lot of picture cards beginning with the letter 'b', here's a list for you:
bag, bat, bed, book, bus, bottle, bucket, boy, bedroom, bedbug, bank, baby, ball, balloon, banana, bee, bell, bird, and so on. Ask the children to form the letter out of the picture cards. I usually do a few letters at once. I first have the children help me sort the cards according to their initial sound and then in groups they form individual letters from the picture cards. It really makes them think about the letter shape. They need to think about the shape, how the shape is best formed and the sound that shape represents; they may also have to remember the name of that shape.

I hope you find some of this helpful. If you have any comments or requests, then please throw them my way.

David

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• Alphabet Slam