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What's in a name?

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What's in a name?

Sound Waves Literacy 3/3/19

“students-in-classroom“

Plenty if you are a Sound Waves Literacy teacher! Names are a great source for studying phonemes and graphemes. Students love to discover unusual graphemes in their names. 

Try these ideas to use names in your spelling lessons:

Introduce the week’s focus sound with names

Ask 3 or 4 students who have the week’s focus sound in their name to stand up, e.g. Steven, Molly and Kylie. Ask the class, Which sound do you hear in all of these peoples’ names? When students identify the common sound explore how it is represented in each of the names.

Play Whose Name?

Students love this quick game. It really makes them think about phonemes and graphemes and can be adapted for any level of primary school.

  • Whose name starts with house? (Harry)
  • Whose name has  as the third sound? (Kerryn) 
  • Whose name has five sounds? (/G/r/a/n/t/)
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The Great Australian Schwa video activities for upper years

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The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. You and your students will be working with the schwa in most spelling lessons (even though it’s not formally taught until Unit 36). We’ve created a fun video ’The Great Australian Schwa’ to…
Introduce the focus sound as a school

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Sound Waves Literacy has been carefully structured so that for any given week the focus sound is the same across Years 1 to 6. This consistency makes it easy to introduce the focus as a whole school.