Friday, May 31, 2013

b,d,p,q


Wow it's been so long since I've posted. One of my bazillion goals for the summer is to try and write at least one post each week. I thought I'd start back with something quick and simple.

I've seen a lot of ideas for how to teach students to correctly identify lower case b & d and p&q.  I thought I would share an idea that I used with my class this year. It's pretty simple but it worked well.

One of the skills that we practice to prepare for testing is identifying which letter is different in a given set of letters. I noticed that when we looked at a set like  pqp or bdb that my students were not paying attention to the fact that the letters were facing different directions.  Instead of concentrating on the names of the letters or the sounds they made we started by focusing on the direction the letters were facing.

Each day during our morning warm up we looked at letter sets on the ActivBoard and circled the letter that was facing a different direction. Then we began connecting them to the letter names. We said that the letters were going different places. The b is headed to baseball in one direction and the d is going to the doctor in the other direction. The p is going to a party and the q is going to see the queen (one of my students came up with this one when I couldn't figure out where the q could be going).

Creating an awareness of the different directions that the letters face combined with daily practice really helped my kinders with b,d, p, & q.

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