This week, we had to prepare a literacy station for a grade of our choice. I choose grade 1 because that is the grade of my practicum. Throughout this experience, I had 3-4 students in a group and we rotated groups every 10 minutes. I found my literacy station on Tik Tok and I used the persons idea and made it my own by incorporating multiple different phonic styles in my iSpy. Ms. Tori has many good ideas for literacy centres. Here are some of her ideas:

  • Roll and read
  • Read and Draw (decodable text)
  • Shut the box
  • Sentence scramble
  • Teacher table (UFLI)
  • Build a story (character, setting, main event)

She has so many great ideas that I will be taking into my practicum!

My Activity:

This iSpy has “magic e”, long and short vowels, and blending words. What the students will do is pick which iSpy sheet they want then they will grab a white board marker. Depending on what the students pick they will then either cross off the word that they find or they will have to write the word that starts will that letter. As well, students can circle the objects that they find to help them keep track. I was there to help students sound out words and let them know if they were missing any of the objects that correlated to their letter.

Here is a picture of my literacy station:

Photos taken by Lauren Penney.

Here are what my peers in the same classroom decided to do:

  • Roll and Read
  • Snakes and Ladders
  • Bingo
  • Word search
Snakes and Ladders
Word Search
Bingo and Roll and Read

iSpy Connection to the BC Curriculum for Grade 1 ELA:

Big Ideas: Playing with language helps us discover how language works.

Curricular Competency: Use foundational concepts of print, oral and visual texts.

Content: Concepts of print. Print awareness. Phonemic and phonological awareness.

Reflection:

I had so much fun doing this with a grade one class. The students seemed engaged with my iSpy and they did quite well with it. I was surprised with how well they did with writing the words down. I did have some students who got confused on what letter they were looking for when they had to write down the object that they found in the side column, so I think making it more clear when I was giving the explanation would have solved that problem. The reason why some of the iSpy had the object words was for modifications and adaptions. I wanted to make sure that the class I was going into could have a challenge (writing the objects words on the side) if they were at that level. I felt like all of the groups were evenly divided up well. A couple of the students started acting silly and playing with the white board eraser so I took them away until they were finished. On average, the students were able to complete two letters of the iSpy. The students really seemed to enjoy this literacy activity and they wanted to keep playing. I cannot wait to use this again with students as I had just as much fun as they did!