The past two months have been really intense – the COVID19 quarantine has world upside down. Today I thought I would share the first of a series of videos which we are generating for our students. FunLab Workshop runs phonics based courses for children from 4 to 12 years of age. We were able to transfer our elementary school age and older children to ZOOM lessons without too many problems. However, the little guys (4 and 5 year olds) have been more difficult. After a series of different approaches, we have started to send pre-recorded video lessons to parents twice a week. We try to keep our students stimulated and learning even if we can’t be together in our usual classes.
This week I tried to combine a crafting with blending and we came up with the idea of CREATIVE LEARNING: Jolly Phonics plus creativity to make reading fun and easy. The first video is H IS FOR HEN! In addition to blending, we tried to also have the kids expand their vocabulary, work on listening comprehension and review pure sounds. Big ambitions for a short video. The three sounds highlighted in the video are h – e – n and the craft is a paper plate hen. I tried to use material that could be found easily at home or at the local grocery store (for those of you out of Italy – our version of quarantine is that only supermarkets and pharmacies are open). A more basic craft that this one just really doesn’t exist.
If you are a parent who wants to try this at home, a fun idea is to have all the material cut out and ready so that the children can build the hen and repeat the words as they create it. This means a little bit of prep time for you but I really guarantee that CREATIVE LEARNING will be a good time for your beginning readers.
You will need:
red paper
glue stick
white paper plates
Watch the video and have fun!
If you would like some other ideas for keeping your kids busy at home while learning English take a look at the FunLab blog’s archive. It is literally exploding with fun ways to spend time together.
keep learning
Alison
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