We are back in the game again after a busy week preparing for our fundraiser, so today, before rest time, we played Alphabet Spin II. Much like our friend, Alphabet Spin I, AS-II is the same deal but with letters from the second part of the alphabet.
I did things slightly different this time, and it worked well. Here’s the skinny:
- Alphabet Spin II: The concept is identical to AS-I–spin and then match the lowercase letter to the uppercase one that the arrow points to on the spinner. This time, instead of mixing up all of the lowercase letter cards, we sorted them (always a worthwhile activity!) and put them in order around the spinner.
Sorting and arranging the letters was extremely helpful and is something I wish I would have done the first time we played AS-I. Today, while we did it, we talked about the letters as we put them in piles, and we chatted about differences between “tough ones” like j/t and p/q before we began.
I think the next few times we play this, though, we’ll mix up the cards and spread them out around the spinner to make it a little more challenging.
Like most of the cool activities I round up over here, this one, too, is from one of the best books on word study– Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction 3rd edition (Merrill Publishers, 2004). A ton of the resources that I have and use regularly comes from this text. A CD accompanies the book, and on it are hundreds of print-outs, games, and sorts that are organized according to spelling stages: emergent through most advanced.
