'oo' family Activities for Special Needs
These 'oo' family activities are highly structured, have simple page layouts and are suitable for children who have trouble processing information and need learning broken into small manageable chunks.
They are also designed for children who are able to blend words with either three or four sounds with a short vowel sound (e.g. pig, swim) but who are finding it hard to recognise words, once decoded.
This pack focuses on the following words, which we teach in two groups, taking one group each week:
room, food, soon, moon, spoon
look, book, cook, foot, good
Please use this pack following the instructions given for the oo Lesson on the Reading Made Simple website.
It is part of a course of lessons which should be taught in the following order as per the Reading Made Simple phonic curriculum.
By focusing on just a few words in this sound family, we can help the child build a bank of recognised words, which is crucial, if we are to develop any reading fluency and comprehension as we advance. These children can find it extremely difficult to build a sight vocabulary - i.e. words, whether sound-outable or not, that the child can recognise on sight. Of course, if the child cannot remember a word, s/he can always sound it out - the safety net and their security giving confidence that many lack
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The activities are simple, the pages have little content to reduce mental overload. They are designed to be worked through a little and often, rather than the child being expected to sit for a long period of time, as such children cannot concentrate very long.
The activities target the areas that many children struggle with: word recognition, phonemic awareness, ordering sounds and tracking.
Activities include: exploring the same sound patterns in words, reading fluency games/charts/exercises, reading short sentences, reading comprehension (both at word and sentence level)
What is included?
- 2 Activity packs:
The 'e family' word list is broken into 2 parts. In each we study only 5 words a week - hence this pack contains material for two weeks of instruction. Children with special needs often need at least this long to become familiar with each sound fully.
- 3 Reading books
2 levelled/graded reading books are supplied using only the words taught in this family and the previously taught families, so providing a safe reading programme for children with poor working memory/word recall
- 2 Games
Games help to take the stress out of learning. The child gets caught up in the game and forgets the effort. In addition, it is not the child's inability to read/spell that is the cause of him/her losing - it is the 'way the game went'.
You can find the word lists (for extra revision and handy reference here:
