Word Chains

 

Word chains are good practice to acquire automaticity with speech sounds. Word chains can provide practice for targeted speech sounds. Soon, under Teacher Tools on our website, we will have word chains to practice different sounds. Our first word chain will have words with the short /a/ vowel sound. Teacher’s can use these chains by dictating the words to students and then having the students make one sound change. When making a word chain, each new word is different by only one sound. It is best to do this with small white boards so students can erase the letter (usually one letter) to make the new word.

Below is the dialog to use with a word chain.

Teacher: Write the word cat. (Students write the word.) What’s this word? Students say cat.   How do you spell it? Students spell the word c-a-t. Teacher then writes cat on the large board so all can see it.

Teacher: If this word says cat, make one change so it says can. (Students change the t to an n.) What’s this word? Students say can.   How do you spell it? Students spell the word c-a-n. Teacher erases the t in cat and replaces it with an n.

Continue the chain with the above dialog. With this approach, students are seeing the word, hearing the word and writing the word. They are using three of their five senses: sight, hearing and kinesthetic (by writing the word). Each time after the students have made the change on their white boards, the teacher changes her word as the students spell the new word.

Here are the words for a chain using words with the short /a/ vowel sound.

cat

can

ran

rap

sap

lap

map

man

fan

fat

rat

mat

This word chain with short /a/ words would be good to use when students are doing Lessons 1 and 2 in English Reading and Spelling for the Spanish Speaker Book 1.

Fisher Hill’s English literacy program has six levels.

Each level contains:

an English Reading and Spelling workbook

English Reading Comprehension workbook

English Writing Composition workbook

and an English Vocabulary workbook.

For each level, students need to always start with the English Reading and Spelling workbook. Then students can use the Reading Comprehension and Writing Composition workbooks at that level to practice their comprehension and writing skills. With the vocabulary workbooks, students review the vocabuary from each particulary level.

Next week’s blog will include a word chain using short /i/ words.

Visit our website www.Fisher-Hill.com to learn more about our literacy workbooks and to view our many different teacher resources.