Phonics Assessments and Activities

            I am observing in a 2^nd grade classroom and most of these skills should be mastered by the 2^nd grade. Thus, I observed a student during daily reading and writing activities in order to determine mastery rather than assessing a student on these skills.

            Every day, students have free reading time. Typically, a writing component is attached to the free reading. For example, on this day, students were to write about character personality traits that they noticed. I used these activities as an opportunity to observe for mastery of print awareness, sounds of speech, phonemic awareness, and phonics.

Print Awareness: As the student is in 2^nd grade, she was very accustomed to reading books and read the book from left to right and top to bottom.

Sounds of Speech: The student correctly recognized and pronounced all of the sounds and words in the book.

Phonemic Awareness: In the few times that the student came across an unfamiliar and difficult word, the student was able to separate the word into phonemes and pronounce it correctly.

Phonics: The student spelled most words correctly, only having a few mistakes with words that have irregular spellings. For example, the student wrote “mean” as “meen” as it follows the same sound pattern as “seen”. 

While in general, this student did not need much additional help in these skills, there are numerous websites available with activities than can help younger or struggling students work towards mastering these skills.

 ABC Fast Phonics: This site used cartoons and audio to teach basic phonics principles beginning from “sounds and letters” to “common words”.

Earobics: This site has several games that teach phonics. Games are tiered by difficulty from beginning, to intermediate, and advanced. Games cover several subjects from letter-sound correspondence to sentence word order.

Sadlie-Oxford: This site has phonics activities and games separated by grade level. Examples of the games include “Alphabet Zoo”, where students place animals in the zoo based on the beginning sound of their name and Memory Games of various sorts that deal with sounds, words, and rhymes.

Clifford Interactive Storybooks: This Clifford activity has students grouping objects that begin with the same sound. The activity is fairly short, but can be played over and over with different sounds.