If you are teaching young readers, then phonics is a vital part of your reading instruction.
Introducing the Short O Sound
You will want to start by connecting what your students already know to what they will learn. As you will see in this presentation, I like to do that using pictures.
This presentation is for older students learning phonics patterns for spelling. It includes the less common spellings of the short o sound.
Both of these presentations are from my Learning to Read at Home Workbook! You can get it at Teachers Pay Teachers.
Once your students understand and can recognize the short o sound in words, they will still need practice to automatize decoding it. Automatization happens when a skill becomes effortless through repetition. Things that are automatized do not take up working memory, so the brain can focus on other things, such as comprehension. There are lots of great ways to build decoding automatization. These are just a few!
Word Maker Game
I created the word maker game to give students lots of decoding practice without having to create thousands of word cards. I have done that before, and they become hard to manage. In the word maker game, students have a mat with the rime of a word family and cards with onsets. They combine the onsets and the rimes to make words. Here is a video explaining the game:
You can get the Word Maker Game for Short O Words for free!
Short O Word Maker Game
Do you want reading in context practice for your students? You can use this presentation that has sentences with short o words. I find sentences helpful for building up stamina for decodables or a quick assessment.
There are so many ways to help your students master decoding short o words! You can pair students up and have one be the word reader, and the other be the word speller. You can have students read words in isolation to you. You can have students sort words to show different properties. For all of these activities, it will be helpful to have a word list. Luckily, I created a free word list you can use. Click the link to check it out!
Free Short O Word List
Do you have ideas for practicing decoding and encoding the short o sound? Share them with us!
