phonics

Teaching Pronunciation

03/24/2020 by admin

As a teacher with limited class time, how can you best meet your students’ needs when it comes to pronunciation practice? With younger kids, if you teach phonics with a rigorous focus on phonemes, pronunciation is built into the program. In this post I detail some additional activities that you and your students may enjoy. When teaching older kids and adults, a bit of time set aside for pronunciation can allow for focused, effective, and enjoyable activities in an otherwise busy schedule. Importantly, consistent practice is key to making a difference in your students’ pronunciation.

There are a variety of downloadable pronunciation games and templates in this post. They are free for you to download and use in class. There are also numerous resource links you may want to return to in the future, so be sure to bookmark this page! As always, if there are activities you especially enjoy using in class, let readers know in the comments!

Let’s begin! I’ll start with activities for younger students and move toward activities appropriate for older language learners.

Read to Your Kids!

When I read a story in class, I seat my kids close to me so they can hear and feel the sounds resonating from me. I often invite students to turn pages, point to pictures, and when possible, participate as a group in the reading of the story. Your kids will be picking up your pronunciation as it arrives to their ears in word inflections, emotions, and the rhythms of the story. A tale well told can make a powerful impression on little kids!

Books are numerous, but here is a short list of 10 books I especially enjoy reading in class. As I’m always on the lookout for new titles, please let me know the books you enjoy for story time in the comments below!

Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Today is Monday by Eric Carle
Polar Bear’s Underwear by Tupera Tupera
Clap Your Hands by Lorinda Bryan Cauley
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Eric Carle
No, David! by David Shannon
Excuse Me! by Karen Katz
Cat in a Hat by Dr. Seuss

Teach Phonics!

Phonics and Spelling Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonics lessons are the cornerstone of my kids’ classes. Over the years, and with intention, I built pronunciation practice into my program and that includes phonics and spelling lessons all through elementary school. From the outset, songs, storybooks, and phonics associations introduce a vocabulary bank I exploit and build on in future lessons. As students progress learning CVC words, long vowel sounds, sight words, plurals, and verb conjugations, I never have to worry about exposing my younger students to enough pronunciation and listening practice.

The result of this isn’t only for good pronunciation delivery. In the beginning, it’s especially important that students learn how to hear me, to be able to individuate the 44 sounds of my language and then imitate how I vocally vibrate, aspirate, and fricitate as an English speaker. So, the path to proper and consistent English pronunciation starts with listening and identifying, and THEN speaking! Phonics lessons will give you a wealth of material and a consistent focus when teaching young children.

Chants and Tongue Twisters

As I mentioned in my post, The Drama is Real, chants have legs! Like songs, they dance about in children’s heads right out of the classroom. This kind of activity isn’t just for younger students. Older kids and adults can benefit enormously from pronunciation activities that include fun exercises like tongue twisters. Remind your students that professional newscasters, actors, and singers use tongue twisters as warmup exercises all.the.time! Check out engVid for 50 classic tongue twisters that will help your students learn to enunciate. And don’t forget rhymes for choosing players! You’ll be surprised how quickly your students will pick up these chants if you employ them regularly.

Icka bicka soda cracker,
Icka bicka boo.
Icka bicka soda cracker,
Out go YOU!

Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish.
How many pieces do you wish?
1-2-3 and you are IT!

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pair work is essential and a good deck of minimal pair flashcards is worth its weight in gold! Minimal pairs are words that differ in one sound only, like pit and pet. When you teach English words in groups that point out differences as well as similarities, your students will be able to hear the differences that distinguish words from one another. Early phonics lessons like cat, can, and cap, work like minimal pair exercises and shouldn’t be dropped once students learn to read. Minimal pairs are excellent listening and speaking practice for older kids and adults as well. They can be employed in a variety of ways besides testing and assessing.

Playing games with minimal pairs allows students to flex their vocal muscles and exercise their ears. If you’re looking for flashcard activity ideas, check out my 50+ Flashcard Activities. Try a game where students listen to a string of words to identify one that is different. A simple ‘missing card’ activity is easy to set up and can be a real challenge! Put three or four words on the board, have students cover their eyes, and remove one of the cards. Students guess which card is missing. Try silently mouthing or whispering target words during a game. This is good for focusing on and exaggerating mouth positions for English sounds. If you’re in a space that allows for more rambunctious fun, try relays or positioning students at opposite ends of the room for some loud pronunciation practice. Placing a physical barrier between players forces them to listen more carefully and communicate clearly!

You can download a free set of 25 minimal pair flashcards with five sets of words for each sound pair. The flashcards include master cards, pair cards, and individual word cards so you can adapt them to a variety of games and activities. Also included is a PowerPoint template for making your own! The zip file is large, so have patience when downloading. Caroline Bowen, AM, Phd, of speech-language-therapy.com has created a generous online list of words you can draw from when putting together your own minimal pair flashcards and worksheets.

Exit Tickets

The thing I love about Exit Tickets is that they’re a quick way to assess lessons taught or determine lessons that need to be taught. Hand cards out just before the end of class, go through a quick listening exercise and get them back as students go out the door. Voilà! Instant data to mull over!

These free Exit Tickets are aligned to the Minimal Pair Flash Cards above and include a PowerPoint template. I also have ABC Exit Tickets and CVC Exit Tickets available in my online store that I recommend checking out!

Pronunciation Maze

This pronunciation maze is a simple but effective puzzle I regularly use when teaching my kids past tense conjugations and the three -ed sounds /id/, /d/, and /t/. The grid template can also be used for the plural sounds /s/, /z/, and /ez/ and first, second, and third syllable accents. To play, students move from the top-left starting point to the bottom-right Finish by connecting the same target sounds in a maze-like fashion. Use the same board as a warmup or review in a 4-in-a-Row game! Laminate the boards and use counters and you’ll have this game at your disposal for years to come!

You can download three past tense mazes here. The free download includes an answer key, blank and PowerPoint templates for creating your own mazes.

Record Your Students

Recording your students doesn’t have to be for a presentation or speech contest. Having students listen to themselves can be fun, revealing, and instructive! It’s like a sound selfie! Choose an easy reading passage that students are familiar with for individual recordings or a dialogue where students can work in pairs. A simple passage from a fairy tale provides older students with expressive melodrama and fun characters like villains, princesses, and frogs. Remember, many of your adult students are also parents and can be pretty good at reading a children’s story!

Telephone Activity

This activity will give you lots of listening and speaking practice in a unique and challenging format! In short, you’re replacing the numbers of a telephone pad with a set of 10 minimal pair words. First, practice the set of words that appear in the activity. Hand out the telephone sheets to students and practice the words again until students are somewhat familiar with their placement on the telephone pad. With a prepared set of telephone numbers, dictate the words to your students. When everyone is finished, check their accuracy. This is a good activity for small groups and pairs as well.

Download this free activity with six gamepads plus a blank pad and PowerPoint template for creating your own.

Pronunciation Pyramid

This is a classic activity, easy to set up, and an excellent warm-up or cool-down exercise. Starting at the top tier of the pyramid, say one of the two words and have students circle the word they hear. Gradually work down the pyramid until you arrive at a number at the bottom. Ask students what number they ended on and see how accurately they listened! Up the ante on this activity by preparing a list of sentences so students have to catch the words in context.

Three free pyramid games plus blank and PowerPoint templates can be downloaded here.

Phonemic Charts

Phonemic Chart Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phonemic Charts are a wonderful tool to help students make sense of English pronunciation. Click here to download the free chart above that includes a black and white version. The British Council at teachingenglish.org.uk put together a set of free and very large phonemic symbol charts you can tack to classroom walls or reference during lectures. I recommend exploring the British Council website as they have some excellent online resources!

If you want to transcribe words or grab the phonemic symbols for your own resources, check out phonetizer.com/ or ipa.typeit.org/ You can translate or type in the codes and then copy and paste to your own documents. When working with the symbols, many fonts will not support the characters. Charis SIL is a supported font you can download here. If there are other fonts you recommend, help a teacher out and let me know in the comments below!

Charts, Word Walls, and Games

Pronunciation Practice Kinney Brothers Publishing Donald's English Classroom

To maintain an awareness of proper pronunciation, as an intervention when necessary, or for specialized practice, I developed a series of easy charts, flash cards, and games. With age-neutral images and easy vocabulary, I use these with my elementary through adult English classes.

The charts include consonants, vowels, blends, digraphs, ‘r’ controlled sounds, and plurals. Each set also has aligned flashcards, Bingo games, and I Have/Who Has activities. Click here to learn more about the complete lineup of resources from my online store, Donald’s English Classroom. In a previous post, A Game With Legs, I detail the myriad ways you can use I Have/Who Has activities in class!

In closing…

It should go without saying, just doing a couple of activities once or twice will not guarantee good pronunciation or fix the problems your students may be having. Pronunciation is NOT a one-off lesson. It’s also important to remember, language learners will only be able to take in so much pronunciation input at one time. More is not always better. Studies have shown that you can teach as few as 3 to 5 minimal pairs in order for students to show spontaneous generalization to other words containing the target sounds. Focused practice will lead your students to a better understanding of English pronunciation so that an occasional “nudge” will keep them on track.

The important thing is to integrate these activities into your class routine whenever possible and find ways to make pronunciation practice an enjoyable challenge.

For convenience, here is a quick list of the six free downloads in this post from Kinney Brothers Publishing:

You might be interested in checking out Teaching Pronunciation, A Followup. This post details a variety of activities I created for my own classes and available in my online store, Donald’s English Classroom.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Teaching CVC Words

04/27/2018 by admin

I hope you enjoy this post about teaching CVC words. Be sure to check out the free offer at the end!

In a previous post, I talked about sight words; what they are, when to start teaching them, and how to effectively work with a variety of learning resources. For the most part, the major points of that post also apply to teaching CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. It bears repeating that, like sight words, when teaching CVC words, the what, when, and how are just as relevant.

A CVC word is a word that is made up of a consonant, short vowel, and consonant sound, such as cat, bed, tip, hot and rug. The goal is for students to use their knowledge of the individual sounds of each letter and ‘blend’ these letter sounds together, so they are saying the whole word and not three individual sounds. It must be explained, and repeated, that such words have a beginning, middle and ending sound that together create a word.
Before you begin teaching CVC words, a child must have a grounding in the ABCs and their phonetic associations. When students can confidently manipulate letters and identify their sounds, they are ready to begin learning CVC words.
Like sight words, CVC words can be exercised using flashcards, word-building activities, games, orthographic practice, and in-text reading exercises.

It is also important to note that, whatever the age of your students, reading fluency will only come with practice. Understanding the steps children work through to understand word constructs and words in context are necessary to determine readiness and track progress.

As you set out to teach CVC words, be prepared with a ready supply of flash cards, games, reading and writing activities, and plenty of review exercises!

CVC Flashcards

Flashcards are a mainstay for many teachers and can be used in so many ways other than flipping through deck after deck of vocabulary words. Check out my 50+ Flash Card Activities if you’re in need of a refresh with your flash card routines.

CVC Flashcards Set

Phonics & Spelling, Book 2

Sorting, matching, ordering, and discovery are the most fundamental components in many flashcard activities. When working with CVC words, it is best to have cards with vocabulary on the front and back to expand their use. Playing games with flashcards like races, relays, Q&A circles, slap games, missing cards, and game board type games, places the emphasis on activities that employ vocabulary rather than a focus on word drilling.

CVC Games

Game boards and card games will really engage your kids when reviewing CVC words. Laminating boards means they’re always ready and less prone to destruction. Boards, plus tokens, dice, and a few rules, and kids will forget that they are reviewing vocabulary! Even though the basic function may be the same across many games, it’s the engagement and the opportunity to practice in stimulating activities that brings about the most meaningful learning.

CVC Reading & Writing

Orthographic exercises that employ reading, word building, and writing activities are perfect for fluency practice and accountability. Worksheets, combined with task cards and other types of manipulatives, make repetition less arduous and more fun. Word puzzles, exit tickets, write-round-the-room activities, and interactive notebooks are just a few of the teaching resources that keep kids engaged while learning to spell. I always look for ways to bring CVC word practice together with coloring, counting, graphing, spinners, dice, random choice, and memory skills, for activities that hold students’ focus on a variety of levels.

CVC Write Around the Room

Making Sentences with CVC Words

Once students are comfortable with building and reading words and can recognize them in text, making sentences and understanding meaning in context are the next steps toward reading comprehension. Creating sentences with image and word flashcards is a great way to get kids to review learned words and learn the most rudimentary rules for sentence constructions. Here, using flashcards, not as a means to drill, but a way of exploring new connections, gives students a creative way to build on their understanding. Try keeping these kinds of flashcards available to students outside of lessons to see what kind of sentences they create on their own. You might even hear them teaching each other!

Sight Word Flashcards

It can’t be stressed enough that learning the concept of word, sounding out the phonemic components, setting learned words into sentences, and then deriving meaning from sentence context are skills that have to be taught, will occur in that order, and must be practiced for children to achieve reading fluency.

CVC Exercise & Review

One of my biggest pet peeves with many textbook series is the lack of quality exercise and review pages. Teachers are too often forced to create their own worksheets to fill in these gaps. For this reason amongst others, I created a phonics series that focuses solely on reading and writing with an abundance of exercise and review pages. I also made sure to include simple explanations, step-by-step exercises, rigorous practice pages where I could track student progress, and lots of coloring opportunities. You can learn more about this series here.

I will finish this post by quoting from Sight Words: What, When, & How:

“As you move from ABCs through emergent reader activities, you’ll want to have reading goals in place. As a teacher, it is important to be able to recognize when a student has a command of the sounds of the alphabet, achieves the concept of word, is displaying rudimentary reading ability, and finally, capable of decoding and deriving meaning from connected text. These concepts must be developed in this order and practiced to achieve reading fluency. The habits that you build into the children’s learning activities will help them to acquire new words more quickly, build on their knowledge base to infer meaning, and progress more confidently in their studies.”

Teaching kids CVC words sets the stage for future reading comprehension and language acquisition. As you move kids from relying solely on their ears and memory to reading and writing, be prepared with a variety of tools to make learning enjoyable, engaging, and productive.

If there are activities that you use in class that are not listed here, help a teacher out and leave a comment!

To help you get started, here is a CVC I Have/Who Has Activity Set you can download for free just by signing up with Kinney Brothers Publishing! Check out the video below to see all this game set has to offer! Click here or on the image above and keep up to date with Kinney Brothers Publishing!

Visit Donald’s English Classroom where you’ll find a wealth of learning materials you can download and start using in your ESL classes today!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

kinneybrothers.com

Planning ahead… 2

02/25/2018 by admin

In the last post, I talked about Stories For Young Readers from Kinney Brothers Publishing and how to purchase the series for your classes. In this post, I’ll focus on our Phonics & Spelling series. I’ll provide links for purchasing and recommended support materials for each text to help you plan for new classes in the spring.

The Phonics & Spelling series, published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.), is available with a special discount through David Paul’s ETJ Book Service. The five-book series is designed to teach kids the fundamental sounds and spelling of English in a multi-year, step-by-step ESL program. For many teachers, a solid phonics program is the cornerstone of their pre-K thru elementary classes. Focused phonics lessons and phonemic awareness improve pronunciation, listening comprehension, and give students the confidence to read and understand English.

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom. Visit for downloadable flash cards, charts, games, and activities.

A to Z is the first step to introducing very young ESL students to the ABCs and phonics. If your kids are just learning to hold a pencil, this is the perfect primer. Children love coloring the large images and build dexterity writing the upper and lower-case letters. Included are easy dot-to-dot coloring pages, mazes, and matching exercises. Check out the preview to learn more.

Flash Card Set – ABC Flash Card Set – Phonics Bingo – ABC & Phonics I Have/Who Has – ABC Bingo Animals – Sea Fishing

ABC & Phonics, Book 1 lays the groundwork for phonetic based learning and focuses on writing and identifying upper and lower case ABCs. With basic writing, matching, and ordering exercises, teachers can readily assess student progress. The alphabet is broken down into four sections, a-f, g-l, m-r and s-z with review for each section. Click here for support materials that include flashcards, charts, games, and activities that make learning the ABCs fun! You can download a preview for this textbook here.

Flash Card Set – ABC Flash Card Set – ABC Bingo – ABC Fishing – Alphabet Charts – Exit Tickets

Phonics & Spelling, Book 2 begins with a review of the ABCs and sets students on their first exercises in sounding out, reading, and writing three-letter (CVC) words. Learned vocabulary is then set into easy sentences to teach students fundamental sentence constructs and meaning. Step by step, students also learn how to read and write a simple self-introduction. The exercises progress in an easy-to-teach, easy-to-comprehend approach adaptable to any program. Included are review pages, puzzles, games, and reading exercises that students find challenging and fun! Be sure to check out the preview here!

Flash Card Set – CVC Word Charts – CVC Word Puzzles – CVC I Have/Who Has – Swimming with Sharks – CVC Write Around the Room

Phonics & Spelling, Book 3 takes students further in building English reading and writing skills. Book 3 begins with a review of CVC words and then takes students to the next challenge of reading, writing, and spelling silent ‘e’ (CVCe) words, words with ea-ee-ey spelling, as well as th, sh, and ch digraphs. Exercise pages also include practice with numbers, plurals, more extended reading practice, and basic question forms using do and can. Check out the preview here!

Flash Card Set – CVCe Word Charts – CVCe I Have/Who Has – Silent e Bingo – Phonics Activity Set – ESL Pronunciation Practice

Phonics & Spelling, Book 4 completes the phonics series with almost two hundred packed pages of phonics lessons, reading and writing practice, puzzles, spelling tests, and Q&A drills. Exercises include consonant blends, digraphs, dipthongs and practice with silent k, g, and ion. The phonics lessons in this textbook create a solid foundation that supports students in their future English language learning. Download a preview here.

Flash Card Set – Dipthong & Digraph Charts – Task Cards – 320 Word Flash Card Set – Clock Bingo – Community Places

If you’d like to learn more about all Kinney Brothers Publishing has to offer, please download our catalogues! Peruse the complete lineup of our Global Edition ESL Textbooks or check out our ESL Store right from your desktop! Sign up for our newsletter and download a free CVC I Have/Who Has Activity Set!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at info@kinneybrothers.com.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

kinneybrothers.com