This week, our class returned back to Gordon Terrace Elementary School to teach primary literacy stations! I’m continuously amazed at how welcoming the GT staff have been – inviting us, teacher candidates, into their classrooms to gain more hands-on experience has been such a gift this semester 🙂

My Literacy Station

I worked with the Grade 1/2 students, focusing on the phonics concept of magic e! The activity I designed was a Roll & Read – Magic E game.

Supplies:

• 6-sided dice
• Gameboards
• Markers of different kinds (20 of each is great) – I used animal erasers, which the students loved 🙂

How it works:

• Create student pairs
• Give each student pair a gameboard, a die, and two sets of different markers
• Partners/teacher decides who goes first – I had the students play rock, paper, scissors which worked well 🙂
• Students take turns rolling the die
• The number rolled corresponds to a row on the gameboard
• The student selects a word to read from that row
• If the word is read correctly (after sounding it out), they mark the space with their marker
• If a word is unfamiliar, we sound it out together and leave it unmarked to revisit
• If a row is full, students continue rolling the die until a number comes up that has words available
• If you want to play competitively, the first student to make a vertical or horizontal line can be implemented (4-6 words in a line) – I left this out!

Reflection:

I created my activity to support students’ understanding of CVCE (consonant-vowel-consonant-e) words, to help them learn how adding an e changes the vowel from a short to a long sound. A key factor in the success of this station was the small group size. At most I had 4 students, so I was able to provide targeted support to both groups as needed through the more challenging words. When students struggled with certain words, I first covered up the magic e and we read the CVC word by sounding it out. Then we reviewed the class’s “bossy e” phonics rule: “e is bossy because it makes the vowel say it’s name”, to reinforce the concept. During one of the rotations, I had a higher needs group. One student was not able to participate in the reading task, but still enjoyed playing with the animal markers, while the other students needed much more support with decoding the words. Reflecting afterwards, I realized I should have grabbed a mini-whiteboard and pivoted my activity. Rather than having the students work in partners and trying to support all the learners simultaneously, I could have led a whole group mini-lesson. Students could have all took turns rolling the dice and choosing a word to build and read together. I could have used the whiteboard to visually break apart the word, going over each of the letter sounds independently, before adding the e and showing the change in sounds. I believe this would have made all learners feel more included, increased engagement and would have supported a deeper understanding of the what and why behind the vowel sound change. Overall it was a great learning experience and I had a lot of fun working with the class!

BC Curriculum – ELA Focus

Grade 1

Grade 2