Language Support Program

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Module 4.2 Teaching strategies: the Early Years

Teaching approaches for ICPAL–Conventions

Resource 4.4 outlines some examples of teaching procedures for the conventions of language. It defines the ‘aspects of language’ and recommends appropriate ‘teaching and learning strategies’ for students with language difficulties in the Early Years.

Professional learning activities

  • Locate, gather and interpret resources

Examine ‘Resource 4.4 Examples of teaching procedures: ICPAL–Conventions’. Try to understand its content and its recommended approach. You might like to compare the ‘aspect of language’ with the ICPAL language framework (Appendix 3) to see where each aspect fits.

See

Print Resource 4.4 and put it in your teaching portfolio. Use it in developing teaching and learning activities that support the development of the ideas of, or meanings in language for a student or students with language difficulties.

 

Activities for ICPAL–Conventions

The following is a collection of teaching activities for teaching the conventions of language in the Early Years of schooling. While activities are arranged under the Conventions component of the ICPAL framework, all language exchanges involve using skills across the ICPAL areas.

Although some activities are confined to particular levels of skills and interest, the majority of these activities can be adapted for use across year Prep to Year 4, and across ability levels.

Professional learning activities

  • Locate, gather and interpret resources

Browse through the following teaching activities for Conventions (phonological and grammatical). With which are you familiar? Have you already used any of these activities in a class? Consider copying, adapting, and adding to these in a teaching portfolio for use in practical teaching activities to develop language and literacy, or in supporting students with language difficulties.

  • Use reflective learning techniques

Individually, or in pairs, attempt to match activities to the ‘Aspects of language’ and ‘Teaching and learning strategies’ in ‘Resource 4.4 Examples of teaching procedures: ICPAL–Conventions’.

Phonological conventions

Nursery rhymes

  • It’s time to rediscover nursery rhymes! Read nursery rhymes with your students and get them to fill in words that rhyme with the previous lines. (For example, Jack and Jill, went up the ______.) You can try changing the names and the rhymes themselves to see if you and your students can think of words that rhyme (e.g. Bill and Mary, fed their __________).

Rhyming competitions

  • These are more difficult. Choose two words that are simple in nature. Discuss with your students if you think that one word or the next will have the most words that rhyme with it. Write the words down and see which student wins! (For example, pin, pat, pig, pick, watch, pot, pine, let, leg, bog, pen, pant, man, bite, ring, chair, shoe, bag, coat, sky.) Consonant blends to use can include: sh/ch/th/tw/pl/bl/fl/sn/st/sk.

Rhyming snap

  • You can develop a set of cards with pairs of cards that include words that rhyme (e.g. bear/pair). Use the cards in a game of ‘snap’.
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Rhyming colours

  • Choose a colour with the students. Help them to make a poster of all the words they can think of that rhyme with that colour (e.g. red – head, bed, said, fed, wed, fled). They can draw, cut and paste, or write the words on the poster.

Syllables

  • Talk to your students about what syllables are. It can help to explain syllables as the handclaps that we put to words, or the drumbeats that words have in them. It can be helpful for students to recognise early on if a word is long or short (e.g. mosquito is a long word, dog is a short word). You can explain that long words have more than one syllable in them. You can develop a chart to help students to count syllables.

How many syllables in a name?

  • Introduce the topic of names of family members. Identify how many syllables exist in each person’s name. Who has the name with the most syllables? Who has the name with the least syllables? How many one-syllable names can you think of? How many two-syllable names can you think of?

I spy with my little eye a word that has XX syllables

  • This is a great game to play at home, in the car, at school, etc. You or your student say I spy with my little eye a word that has XX syllables and the other person must guess it. This means that the student can identify and practise words that have one, two or three syllables, etc.

Breaking pictures up into syllables

  • Choose a word (e.g. alligator). Count the number of syllables in the name and then cut a picture of the object into the same number of parts. Get the student/s to assemble the parts and say each syllable separately and in combination.

Sound-letter links

  • Talk about the letters of the alphabet and what sounds they make. Try involving the name of the letter and the sound in a game (e.g. sound-letter snap). The student plays a game with cards of the alphabet and when they put the card down on the table, they must say the letter and the sound. You may have to help with this. Also, talk about what words start with the use of a particular sound (e.g. cat starts with a k sound, not just c – i.e. c-see). Try not to do the alphabet in order so that students cannot rely on rote learning e.g. the A,B,C song.

Initial and final sounds

  • Choose a word and practise identifying the initial and final sounds of the word. ‘Eye spy’ is a great game for identifying initial sounds but make sure the students say the sound and not the name. You can also use Eye spy for final sounds (e.g. I spy with my little eye, something that ends in a ‘g’). You can use lotto or bingo cards for this or simply things in the room!

First or last sound snap

  • Use a game of ‘snap’ where you can only snap if the word or name either starts with the same sound or ends in the same sound. Hearing initial sounds is easier for students, so you may need to concentrate on this more to begin with. Any commercial cards can be used (e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine, Disney Princesses, AFL cards). Select the card type to suit the interests of the student.
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What is the head and tail of the animal?

  • Create a game where you use pictures and relate the first sound to the head of the animals and the final sounds to the tail of the animal. (For example: What is in the first carriage of the train? What is in the last carriage of the train? What do family members’ names begin and end with? Can the students notice other people whose names start with a particular sound?) Note: sh th ch each have one sound so shark starts with a sh not an s.

Challenge

  • Use a ‘challenge’ activity that includes counting numbers of sounds or syllables (e.g. how many s sounds are in the sentence She sells sea shells on the sea shore).

Number plate game

  • Get a student to practise initial sounds outside the classroom in order to make sentences. When they are being driven in a car, they can practise making short sentences with the starting sounds of the first part of a number plate (e.g. OJL Orange Juice is Luscious).

Blending

  • Students need to be able to blend words together so that they can make sense of words they don’t know. This activity involves being able to recognise the sound the letter makes (hence the importance of sound-letter links). The student has to remember the initial sound of the first letter in a word and ‘attack’ the next sounds in the word, joining them together to work out what the word is. Being able to blend words from another person’s demonstration is part of being able to do this. (For example, when you say d…o…g the student can blend the sequence together and make sense of this word as dog.) Auditory memory is very important in this task, as a student must be able to remember all of the sounds involved so they can blend them.

Blending simple three-sound words with picture cues

  • You will need pictures of three sound-words. Ask your student to point to the c…a…t using the sounds only. Words used could include cat, dog, house, man, girl, horse, hat, bat, rat, meat, etc.

Blending simple words with no picture cues

  • Use any items in the class or house. In a class or schoolyard, you can say Can you pass me the b…ll. At home, a parent can reinforce the skill by asking, when in the kitchen, Can you pass me the f…or…k please? You can move on to more complex words once the student has mastered simple three-sound words (e.g. What words can you think of in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, car, etc?).

Blending using real print

  • Use your child’s readers to show them the different sounds in words. It is important to include the vowel sounds as well; so if there is a word that your student does not know, say m…ea…t rather than m…eat. This way, the vowel sounds get covered. Once simple words have been established, students need to be able to hear consonant blends (e.g. sl sk br fl cl). This is often where students get confused. Break the words up as in the initial blending activities. It is very useful to get students to ‘feel’ what their mouths are doing during these activities, as it means that they are able to be more independent when they are outside, or back in the classroom. Ask Where can you feel the sound in your mouth? Is it a long sound? Is it a short sound? Is it a soft sound?

Alliteration

  • Alliteration is skill that students need to know. This means that they are able to work out the first main sound in tongue twister types of sentences or rhymes (e.g. Fanny fish found five filthy frogs, Dan the dog devours disgusting delicacies). Choose a sound. Again, it is a good idea to use a sound that is being covered in the classroom. Make your own tongue twisters for these sounds. This task can be quite challenging so you may have to take the lead for this. You can sometimes brainstorm lots of words first and then put them into a story or rhyme.

Manipulation

  • Being able to manipulate words, and sounds in words, means that students are able to hear sounds, maintain them in their working memory and make changes to make new words. This skill will help students to write new words simply by deleting the first, the last, or the middle sound and adding a new one in. (For example, cat – take away the k sound, add a b sound to get bat; take away the t sound and add a b sound to get cab; take away the a sound and add a u sound to get cut.)

You need to start with compound words. Then move to syllables. Then move to sounds.

  • compound words (e.g. What do I get if I take the cow away from cowboy?)
  • syllables (e.g. What do I get if I take the fly away from butterfly?)
  • sounds (e.g. What do I get if I take the p away from play? What do I get if I take the t away from plant? What do I get if I take the ‘n’ away from ‘plant’?).

You will notice that there is a progression from compound words to syllables to sounds, and that there are progressions within the sound part in words as well. These need to be adhered to as they are the developmental progression that this manipulation goes through.

You can also play games with students, getting them to replace sounds in words. For example: What do we get if we take away the b from boy and put a t in its place? This can be incorporated with many different words. Again, start with simple three-sound words and move on to words that are more difficult.

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Grammatical conventions

Noun/verb race to the line game

  • In this game, you divide students into two groups: nouns and verbs. Having discussed that ‘nouns are names’ and ‘verbs are doing words’, the students line up (on a netball court) N/V/N/V, etc. When you call out either a word that is a noun or a verb, the groups of nouns or verbs have to run (e.g. if you call out banana, the nouns run; jumping, the verbs run). The last one back then sits out of the game and helps you to judge. You can expand this with adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech. With younger students you may prefer to use the terms ‘things’ and ‘actions’.

Memory game with sentence structure

  • These examples are for the structure of irregular past tense.
  • ‘I went shopping and I bought a ……………….’
  • ‘I went to the zoo and I saw a …………………..’
  • ‘I cooked a _________ and ate a ______________’
  • ‘I fell down the stairs and broke my ________’, etc.

Pronoun game

  • In this game students must describe what is happening when other members of the class/group perform different actions. You should choose a boy, girl and small group to do the actions. The rest of the class then has to describe what is happening without using the names of the class members, but rather personal (e.g. he/she) and possessive (e.g. her/his) pronouns.

Talking picture snap, memory, fish or bingo

  • In this game, decide on the sentence structure that your class or small group needs to work on. Use picture cards to play any of the games mentioned. Before completing their turn, the student must verbally describe what is happening in the picture by using a complete sentence. Playing cards can be purchased (e.g. Finding Nemo; Disney Princess; AFL cards) or created (e.g. Emotion cards; Football cards – Collingwood played … last weekend and … (won/lost); Character cards – Ariel likes to eat … cards). The aim is to have an expressive language expectation for each turn.

Twenty questions

  • A student must think of something (e.g. a person, place or thing) and the other students must ask questions about it to work out what it is. Students must try to narrow down what it might be by excluding categories. This game also teaches the students specific question-asking skills. Having a standard question type can help students to remember how to ask a question. When aiming for sentence structure practice, encourage the other students to answer in a full sentence.

Celebrity heads

  • Three students are at the front of the class. The rest of the students can see their person, place or thing headband. Students who do not know what their word is must work it out by excluding categories through a process of elimination. By adding places and other objects, you have more of an opportunity to expand the vocabulary range used by students. This also encourages students to learn to use question forms. You may like to model the correct sentence/question structure for students and have written cues for students.

Conjunction corner

  • Give the students a range of short sentences either written or with writing and pictures. Explain that they can add two sentences together by using conjunctions. Prepare cards with conjunctions and get the students to initially join two sentences with simple conjunctions. Then they can progress to conjunctions that are more complex. Ask the students to work out whether they have put all of the main ideas into the sentences and also whether the sentences make sense.
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Sentence jumble

  • In this activity, the teacher presents the small group/class with a sentence that has been cut into individual words. You may use picture symbols to assist. The students must arrange the words to make a grammatically correct sentence.

Conjunction jumble

  • This is an activity where the teacher provides the small group/class with two short sentences on cards and a range of conjunctions on separate cards. The students must put the two sentences together using a range of conjunctions and discuss how the different conjunctions can change the meaning of the new sentence.

Sentence completion activities

  • The students are given the first part of a sentence and must finish it grammatically.

Statements to questions

  • Give the students a range of statements that they must change to questions. Provide examples of how the word order changes to convert statements into questions. You can use statements written on cards that students can cut and physically manipulate to make questions.

Grammar guesses

  • Prepare a box containing a number of words (i.e. parts of speech) written on cards. The student chooses a card and has to work out what word would have come before the word chosen, and after the word chosen (e.g. if the student chooses the word going then they must guess at the words prior to and following going – for example, is going home).

Human sentence

  • Write a sentence on cards. Cut it into pieces. Each student has to choose a card and work out where to stand in order so that a grammatically correct sentence is made. The rest of the class can read the sentence and work out whether it makes sense.

A long time ago

  • This game involves changing sentences from present tense into past tense. The students need to understand that a different form is used when talking about something that has already happened. You can talk about the morphological endings, how they sound, and also those that are irregular.

Running commentary

  • Two students have to act out an action at the front of the class, and each student takes it in turn to make up a sentence about what the students at the front of the class are doing. A variation of this is ‘Newsreader’, where students pretend to be newsreaders while describing actions.
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