Teach young readers to ‘decode’ new words with phonics
Did you know that less than 50% of American fourth graders scored as proficient readers in a recent Reading Performance survey conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress?
One reason for this low number may be that while speech is something that children acquire by hearing and using it often enough, research has shown that reading doesn't come naturally. This research goes against the idea that children will learn to read simply by being surrounded with good books and guessing their way through them using context clues and vocabulary.
Phonics, or the relationship between letters and sounds, can give students the skills they need to start reading better and decoding unfamiliar words. But how does a teacher teach these skills while keeping children interested in reading? Phonics lessons and activities from Gynzy can help!
Check out some of our most popular phonics activities below, and create an account to get started!
We offer both quick learning activities and longer lessons to give educators flexibility in how they want to use Gynzy in their classroom. Some of our most popular phonics activities include:
You can find more about our pre-made, standards-aligned phonics lessons below. You can also do the same by creating a Gynzy account and browsing the Library.
There are 44 sounds or phonemes in English, but not all teachers agree on how much time should be spent memorizing these basic letter-to-sound relationships. Phonics is the study of this relationship as a means of giving students the tools they need to decode individual words, rather than relying on context clues elsewhere in the text. To get students comfortable with this, Gynzy lessons about decoding single syllable words include:
While the strategies a teacher uses to teach literacy skills will vary by classroom, most teachers settle on a combination of phonics instruction, sight words and irregular spellings, and reading fun texts to put those skills into practice. Gynzy lessons about decoding multisyllabic words and recognizing vowel “teams” include:
When teaching students phonics and literacy skills, it’s important to remember that reading should be fun. Give students frequent opportunities to develop their skills in fun games and activities. These lessons cover additional phonics concepts for developing readers and are enriched with activities to help students remember what they’ve been taught:
You can find more advanced phonics lessons on the phonics and word recognition section of our Library. There, additional lessons cover topics such as irregularly spelled words, prefixes and suffixes, and many different sight word lessons.
Learning to read is one of the most basic skills we can give our students. By teaching students to read, write, and think critically, they can be taught to overcome challenges they will face in life. English lesson plans from Gynzy help K-8 students develop these skills in engaging lesson plans that work in a classroom or online learning environment. Start delivering more engaging ELA and phonics lessons by creating a Gynzy account and exploring our Library.
The lessons on our Library are created by our team of Gynzy Authors, a group of current and former educators who use the Gynzy Whiteboard to make engaging lessons and activities. For consistency, our lessons all follow the same basic structure and are reviewed internally before publication.
Our hope is these pre-made, standards-aligned lessons help educators save time on lesson planning, whether you use them as is or customize them to fit the needs of your classroom.