Use these Build A Word mats in your literacy centers to help children master their spelling.
Learning to spell and read takes lots of work.
One of the many skills young children need to master to learn how to spell words correctly is the ability to identify individual sounds and then to be able to blend them together to form a word.
Being able to do this correctly is a phonological awareness skill most children are taught from kindergarten. Generally, most children are able to do this confidently and accurately by the end of grade two.
To help practice this skill, I've added these Build A Word mats to our literacy centre rotations.
Using only a visual clue as a prompt, children are asked to spell the word they can see utilising their growing understanding of sounds.
The number of boxes on the mat also helps guide their answer as they can see the word they are trying to spell only has three letters.
I don't use these mats as we are introducing beginning sounds and CVC words as they contain a mix of words not just single word families per mat.
They are best used to consolidate and review children's understanding of CVC words and their ability to segment and blend initial sounds together to make simple words.
They are best used to consolidate and review children's understanding of CVC words and their ability to segment and blend initial sounds together to make simple words.
Once the children finish building each word, they can write them down on the recording sheets and then use the answer cards to check their words.
Having the answer cards makes this literacy center more independent as the children are always keen to tell you when they have finished but now they don't come and disrupt another group as they can check their own work. I still collect their recording sheet to see how they went and it creates another opportunity for them to write.
To start, we're only using these mats to spell CVC words but I've made similar formatted mats when we're ready to move on to CCVC and CVCC words and then CVCe words.
