Many schools are still implementing a remote option for students and some teachers have discovered that they truly enjoy virtual learning. Whether you are teaching or tutoring virtually, if you teach early readers you must teach phonics remotely!
Why Am I Teaching Phonics Remotely?
We know that phonics is a method of reading by decoding with letter sound correspondences. Phonics is important because it can be used to help readers decode more than 84% of the English language. We know teaching virtually is a lot different from teaching in the classroom. Some of your usual methods for teaching phonics can be difficult to use when your students aren’t directly in front of you or sharing your hands on phonics materials, but there are different strategies you can use!
How to Teach Phonics Remotely
Four of my favorite methods for teaching phonics remotely include BOOM Cards, songs, scavenger hunts, and digital phonics activities.
BOOM Cards
BOOM cards are one of my favorite activities because they are digital phonic activities task cards that are both self-correcting and easy to differentiate! I can assign different sets of cards to my students and BOOM collects data on how long they spent on the task, their accuracy, as well as a record of their best score. I love that it collects data for me that I can use for progress monitoring or interventions. Many BOOM cards are standards aligned and the students like immediately knowing whether they are correct or not. I use these for teaching phonics remotely and in person to focus on mastered and new phonics skills.
Songs
If you have ever met me you know I am always singing and dancing! Songs are so important when I’m teaching kindergarten because they are catchy ways for students to remember important things. Teaching phonics remotely lends itself to many songs! Some of my favorite phonics songs include Jack Hartmann, Have Fun Teaching, Kids vs. Phonics, and Heidi Songs. They are engaging ways to sing phonics rules in context and I often remind students of what sounds something makes by starting part of the song such as “orange…” and they’ll say “shark!” like our favorite Kids vs. Phonics Sh song.
Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts are one of my favorite classroom activities and this did not change when I started teaching phonics remotely. There are many different ways to set this up for your classroom when teaching remotely. You can do this all yourself by having a paper bag full of items and giving your students clues that describe the item so they have to guess what it is.
For example you could have a bag full of items starting with the digraph ch- and give students clues about cheese such as “It is something you eat. It can be orange or white, etc.” You could also have students try and find an item in their home that start with a specific phonics pattern and bring it to class for show and tell.
I’ve posted different words on the wall that I teach in front of and students have to look and find words that match our focus behind me. You could send these words home to parents who might want to hide them in their own home for their children to find. Finally you could try digital phonics activities by looking and finding pictures where students simply look at a page with lots of items and spy items that start with the focus pattern. There are so many ways to do virtual phonics scavenger hunts!
Digital Phonics Activities
While remote teaching in the spring of 2020 and remotely teaching phonics the next school year, I was able to adapt many previously printable resources to work digitally. Some of my favorite activities for teaching phonics remotely included read and color tasks where students would digitally color the correct answer. I loved that fluency strips were easy to assign to individuals based on their level (cvc words, digraphs, blends, and simple sentences or paragraphs, etc.) My students quickly figured out how to annotate the strips online with highlighters and drawing tools and even practice typing the strips working on both spelling and keyboarding skills.
By assigning my monthly word work digitally I could see students annotating in OneNote and even use these whole group to review previously taught phonics skills. My favorite printable turned digital phonics activities would be adapted books. I loved how I could read the book while students viewed it on the screen and they loved the visual comprehension and vocabulary activities that followed. Although teaching phonics remotely is an adaptation, we teachers always find ways to make it work out for our students!
Teaching Phonics Remotely Take Aways
Although teaching phonics remotely can be more difficult than in person, like teaching many subjects, it can be done! With engaging songs, movement activities, and practice, you will enjoy teaching phonics remotely and seeing your students learn to read.
Try a New Activity for Teaching Phonics Remotely Today!
Grab my digraphs scavenger hunt freebie to try with your students! You can easily modify it by putting the cards around your virtual classroom and walking around your room to see if they can find them, sending them to parents who may want to print them for student practice at home, or assigning the list and seeing if students can find any matching objects to bring to class. Let me know how you use it with your students!
