One important transition in Jolly Phonics is from letter sounds to letter names. This can be particularly tricky with bilingual students. In order to make this process more fun we have been working on some games for our classes that I would like to share. I used upper and lower case letters that I found online from Temu. The reasons I like these letters are as follows. First of all, they are fun colors! Secondly, I like the size of the letters – great for small hands. I used two plastic boxes from the Dollar store and got started creating games.
In the first game, I suggest you turn on your favorite alphabet song and have the children rebuild the alphabet using the lower case letters. My favorite songs is from Super Simple Songs but there are lots of fun songs available on YouTube.
In the second game, have the children look for the matching upper case (capital) letters so that their alphabet has both upper and lower case letters.
My favorite game is the final one. Ask the children to build proper nouns – meaning that these words follow the “one capital letter” rule. You can run this in two ways – as a dictation or just have the kids build as many different proper sounds as they remember!
Watch the video to see how we set up the games! Remember to follow us @funlabworkshopenglish for lots of creative ideas for teaching English to ESL students!
Alison and the FunLab Team
