Hi! Just sharing a few templates that I use with my Year 4 & 5 students (reading intervention). I laminate these to create workmats, and the students use ultra-fine whiteboard markers to write on them.
1) ‘Switch It’ workmat – Instead of using grapheme tiles for Switch It with these kids, I use this. Students must stretch the word out, saying the sounds as they write. Then they underline the change.
There are 2 templates. One has a double row of boxes at the top, in which students can write all the graphemes required for the chosen list of Switch It. I don’t use this very often unless there’s a grapheme they might get wrong (eg. c or k for the /k/ sound in a word), but when I do, I call out all the letters at the start and the students would have to write them in those boxes so they can refer to them if needed. And I’m very fussy with neatness – they have to treat the bottom line of the box as though it’s a line in their exercise book. I don’t let them write in the centre of the box! Messy handwriting begone! 😆
Also, some students have become so good at this activity and totally understand the phoneme-grapheme correspondence thing that I now just get them to write the words in a list in their exercise books instead of on the workmat 👍 (still underlining the change)
2) ‘Spelling by Sound’ workmat – I use this for learning to write multi-syllable words (usually 2-3 syllables), just until they get the hang of things. First, I show them a word. They read it and identify the syllables. Then they stretch out the sounds in the syllables, writing on the workmat as they say them. (One sound per box. Leave a gap between syllables). Lastly, they write the whole word at the end.
3) ‘Spelling by Syllable’ workmat – After they’ve got the hang of multi-syllable words with 2), they start using this workmat. Same process, but they write one syllable per line.
Hope this is helpful to someone 🙂