I've read many people have problems with phonics, and the pronunciations of letters.I saw one of the teachers at one of my elementaries last year using the website http://www.starfall.com/n/level-k/index/load.htm?f Its an easy alphabet song that introduced the 'common' sounds of letters, and it seemed to help the class she used it with. So I looked it up again this year, and thought I could use it for my winter camps... because the principal decided that the students must do speeches. GREAT - a group of grade 1-6's doing speeches when they struggle with pronunciation - okay... so they do 1 hour of phonics and 1 hour of speech work each day.So the ABC song from the starfall website was introduced, and then I made the Starfall ABC's ppt to show the students what the man on the site is talking about. I went through, asked them the letters, and the sounds, and then what the picture was. We then sang the song through using the ppt so they had visuals. And then followed through with the alphabet phonics game which is using a Mario template (made by shane teacher - dajeon). The students were told they had to tell me 1) the letter, 2) the sound of the letter and then 3) the word we'd just learned. If they got all 3 right, they got the points. The 6th graders were allowed to help the 1st and 2nd graders if they needed help, but they couldn't help anyone else. The class was also told that if the other team answered out of turn they got minus points (so they'd get minus whatever the other team got. eg: answering team gets 5 points, the calling out team gets -5 points). They asked to play the game the following day because they'd enjoyed it so much. It didn't seem like 'learning' to them, and its helping improve their pronunciation. Their speeches have improved already, and they only got the speeches on Monday.
