Phonics is popularly known as a method of teaching children how to connect letters or group of letters with sounds or even vice versa. For example, a child should be taught that the hard “k” sound is associated with letters “c”, “k” or “ck”. The method of teaching phonics has always had controversies surrounding it, especially in the United States of America where it has been prominent since mid 19th century. However the controversies increased with the reemergence of phonics in the 1950’s.
Phonics have generally been used in various class room activities, apart from other reading or writing activities where students and teachers use them. Phonics can be used at an innovative level by merging it with various classroom activities. Let’s take bingo for example. phonics can be combined with bingo to enable kids learn how to pronounce better.
Phonics bingo is not very different from the traditional bingo. Each player is given a bingo card with five by five grid of squares, and the main aim of the player is to either mark a horizontal or vertical or diagonal line of items as called by the bingo caller or the teacher. The main difference between traditional and phonics bingo is that instead of being printed with numbers in their boxes, the boxes are filled with words according to the lesson and subject. More over the game can be modified in different ways.
A few ways to play phonics bingo
- Partial word bingo - The teacher says something like “find the word with ‘pin’ in it”, in response to which the students have to find “spin”.
- Blending bingo - The teacher reads out a word slowly, for example “sss-nnn-aaa-p”, and the students must find the word corresponding to it.
- Rhyming bingo - The teacher reads out a word, and students need to find the word that rhymes with it.
- Silent E bingo - The teacher reads out a word like “pin” and asks what word you would get by adding an E.
We should always keep one thing in mind i.e. phonics is not the only way to learn how to read. Recognition of a few common words that cannot be sounded out has to be done by the student. This list of a few such common words is known as Dolch Sight words. It is recommended and emphasized by many teachers to sight read common words like “is” or “it” as this improves a person’s reading fluency. So phonics bingo is a pretty useful tool to teach young students how to pronounce and increase their English fluency along with pronunciation ability.
Phonics bingo can also be clubbed with sight word bingo to play in class as an interesting activity. The phonics bingo cards can be generated on any online bingo card maker software. This makes things a lot easier by avoiding the difficulty to go all the way to a publisher like the way it was done earlier on. So phonics is a very useful and effective study tool.
Tags: bingo, phonics bingo
