I presented this during a meeting and the response was good. The audience suggested some improvisations and I love it!

• Instead of using boxes, we agreed to paste the word on the board according to the three categories. 
• The suggested words will be verbs and be done in collaboration with another teacher. 

Yeay! Alhamdulillah. I hope this to take off soon with my teachers and I am certain to sell this idea on a full scale after this. Wish me luck!

In my last entry on blending, I mentioned about making pupils understand the concept of blending. I found the approach worked for my target students and I feel there is a need to emphasize on the concept every now and then, especially when you introduce new sounds and words. It helps making sense of the sounds they have smoothed out.

I tried robot talk blending with my learners and sadly it did not work. I even made a robot for this purpose.  I presume the situation occur because my target students were not familiar with the words. In order to successfully blend words, the exposure to words, direct or indirect, is crucial in building the background idea on words. We can do this by singing, jazz chanting or story telling. Our learners will be familiarize with the words and blending will be easy. The pyramid below agrees to this.

Picture from Reading Rocket

So, what did I do?

I decided to try race car blending. I need to experience it myself on how the intervention will work. I borrowed a toy car from my children toy basket and give it a go.

Using onset and rime, I asked my target students to glide the car from one end to another and say the sound when the car pass through them. It was difficult at first but after 2 sessions, I find them concentrating hard to blend the two sounds and Alhamdulillah, success was very sweet indeed.





I am optimistic of this intervention and I know if done consistently, our learners will be able to understand the concept of blending and be able to blend successfully. True, it is hard work. but having known teachers with perseverance as their best friend, rest assured everything will work just fine.

I miss interacting with young learners. I hope these students benefit something from our sessions. I wish them many more success to come.

My family word cloud

I love this!! For so long I wonder how to make it and fate has brought it to me. Alhamdulillah. It is great to make word posters, wallpapers for desktop or phone. I made my first by using the names of my immediate family members. It looks great and I am still wondering how to make one word bigger than another. Further fooling around required.

• Name of pupils in class. Instead of those boring list of names posted on the classroom board, why not use this for a change?
• Teachers' day card or any card. Laminate it and give it away. A little different, hence the attention right?
• Vocabulary in focus. Teachers can make vocabulary list based on topic. Just use the colours and font to differentiate the topics.

Check out the app on play store too!

Enhance vocabulary with VOCBOC

1. Sound the onset then rime.
2. Learners blend the sounds
3. For correct blending, learners feed the robot with the words/pictures.

• Robot talk blending is suitable with learners of L1.
• L2 learners need to have a background knowledge of the language in order to understand robot talk.
• Robot talk can be use to learn syllable once the learners of L2 have been taught the target word.
• The robot horizontal opening on its mouth cause my learners to giggle when they feed him.

Supplies!

Work in Progress

Meet my new friend! MAX