Some curriculum embed strategies of routine, repetition, and visuals that can be very powerful for our students. Sometimes people ask me if I use more phonics or whole language instruction for reading. My answer is – both! To quote my favorite B. F. Skinner, “The learner is always right.” Use whichever approach is most effective for the individual. You don’t need to subscribe to only one theory. You can pick and choose what parts work for your student.
I first meet the Phonics Dance when I student taught in an inclusion second grade classroom and I feel in love. We uses this in our guided reading groups with our lower group who are younger. This is a little too early childhood for my junior high kiddos. But it is great for our younger kids! And seriously – it’s so freaken cute and so freaken fun.
The phonics dance incorporates movements and chants to build phonemic awareness and develop strong decoding skills. These songs and phrases can serve as functional cues and rules for our students when generalizing the skills to actual reading. Great verbal prompts for our kids. Each letter has a little song and dance to remember the sound the letter makes. The next set is “hunks and chunks” to work on remember blends, digraphs, and long/short vowels.
Check it out at: phonicsdance.com. Also you tube “phonics dance” and you will see a bunch of great videos other teachers have made to get the idea of this activity!
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11 Responses
Thanks for sharing this! I have never heard of it and it looks great!
Kate
Do the alphabet pages you have shown come with the program?
Do they have any samples? Would it be to high for grades K-1?
Yes those are included!
Not sure about samples. It would be great for K-1 for building and solidifying phonemic awareness and letter recognition!
I am trying to open the phonicsdance.com link shown and it’s saying ‘page not found’. I went to the website itself and it sells the alphabet cards for $28. Do you know of a more affordable route to getting these? They seemed really great!!
I am not sure what the alphabet cards are – sorry. I found info on this website – https://phonicsdance.com/ – hope this helps 🙂
When you purchase the book, a black and white copy of the cards are in the back. You can make copies on card-stock, color and laminate them yourself if you wish.
Great tip!
Really interesting post!
Great to hear! Thanks for reading 🙂