Literacy skills are essential to almost every subject a child studies in their school lives, so it’s imperative that effective literacy activities are implemented in lessons from the earliest days of pupils’ school lives. There are some quick and fun activities you can provide for your Year 1 pupils that will help them to engage with learning literacy skills, making a more effective learning process all round.
Write a selection of CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words on the whiteboard, and give pairs of children a group of 4-6 words from the board on a worksheet. Play bingo by calling words from the board (you can point to the word you are calling out to make this easier). This will help your pupils to associate the sound of the word with the spelling of the word in front of them.
In groups, pupils can use their reading books and other books in the classroom to find words that end in ‘ff’, ‘ss’, ‘nd’, ‘ng’, ‘lp’, ‘st’, or begin with ‘bl’, ‘cr’, ‘tr’, ‘str’ etc.
Put a CVC word on the board, and in groups or pairs, ask your pupils to come up with as many rhyming words as they can. You can time this activity to make it more of a game.
You tell the class “I am thinking of a word that begins with ‘T’ and rhymes with ‘mop’. What word am I thinking of? The children put their hands up to guess. For added points, you can ask the pupil to spell the word too!
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