Transcript

These are our letter-sound wands. I've put a different material within each wand that corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. For example, within this wand we have popcorn, which makes /p/ sound and corresponds to the letter P. So the student would place the popcorn wand on the letter P. Here we have a tube full of ladybugs, ladybugs makes the /l/, and we would put the /l/ tube on the letter L. 

This is a really amazing gimmick that has a lot of legs because I don't only use these letter-sound wands for this activity but numerous activities throughout the year. For example, I've created mystery word wands. I've placed a sight word within the wand using alphabet beads. What the student tries to do is solve this mystery word and what they use as a resource are their letter magnets. They'll see for example oh, there's a letter V and they'll place a V on a cookie sheet. Oh and I see the letter E and place that on the cookie sheet. And then they'll try to unscramble that word and see what the mystery word is. 

This is another wand activity which is just used actually to reinforce some key vocabulary that we've been learning within the classroom. We have a variety of color words and students find the corresponding color wand that goes with that word. For example, the first one I see is yellow, so then I put the yellow wand with the word yellow. And of course students are going to be using different reading strategies to try to figure out what word that they have in front of them. 

Another thing that we do with these is you can see that I've written the words in all lower case letters, it's really important for the students to start to distinguish their upper case letters from their lower case letters and to learn when it's appropriate to use upper case verses lower case letters as well. I have some students who are ready to learn their vowels as well. So I've written some letters in blue and others in red, so if the student finds themself inclined they can find a corresponding letter magnet that goes with the letters of the word and place them on the cookie sheet. 

Again utilizing the cookie sheets I've come up with a lot of new activities the students can use to learn new words or new vocabulary within the classroom. Here I have the words sunny and windy and I've written them within frames so that students realize that each letter works together to create one whole word. So if they look here they can see there are one, two, three, four, five letters that create the word sunny. 

Really important at the beginning of the year when students are learning those concepts of print. The magnetic letters underneath the word are scrambled so the students have to do sort of a one-to-one correspondence with the letters to create the key vocabulary word. 

I utilize this technique for many words throughout the program. You could use it for months of the year, for days of the week, for thematic words, for sight word vocabulary, the list goes on. You can use both upper case and lower case letters and the students start to realize when it's appropriate to use an upper case letter, for example when they're doing the months of the year or the days of the week.