Does anyone have Jr. High school students who can barely read? Well, this is my attempt at providing some reading practice to my 5th and 6th graders, focusing on long A and short A phonics
I've divided this powerpoint into 3 classes. Each class should take about 5 minutes.
1st class I introduce the Letter Aa and tell them that there is a long Aa sound (A-A-April) in addition to the short Aa sound (a-a-apple). It helps the students to have some sort of hand gesture to go with each phonic. For short Aa i do a check mark in the air and for the long Aa I do an elongating gesture. Then I read the first few words (ex. for the word 'fat', I cover the 't' and say 'fa, fa, fa' uncover the 't' and say 'fat'. This way the students are learning to read the consonant and vowel as a pair instead of seperately. The F sound we typically say is 'fuh', or spelled out 'Fu' as in 'Fun'. But the word Fat uses the phonetic 'Fa'. I want to teach them how to pronounce F based on the vowel that follows. Fa, Fa, Fact, for example is different from Fu, Fu, Fudge. Anyways, continue to read the words and reveal the pictures and ask if they see a difference in the spelling of the words, most will catch that there is an 'e' at the end of the long Aa words.
2nd class is more reading practice.
3rd class is taken from MrIssei's Fall Guys Phonics powerpoint. Thank you Mr. Issei. The words are changed of course. Read the word in the middle, and ask the students if it is short Aa (checkmark gesture) or long Aa (elongating gesture). The last two slides answers are the long Aa (Cape and Rain)
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I am in the process of learning how to teach phonics.
I support what you're trying to do. You'll find the same issue all over Japan.
In Public Elementary Schools kids are not taught how to read, they are taught how to communicate.
They are basically not expected to be able to read or write properly until JHS. They learn the alphabet in 3rd&4th grade, then some activities in 5th & 6th grade have a reading element to them, and they do some basic tracing/copying of words. Although there are some very short phonics activities in the textbooks, these are generally skipped due to lack of class time. I do feel that it really holds back the students' ability to access English significantly, I hope they will change it in future.