Learning Together: an Institut des troubles d’apprentissage initiative to teach children winning strategies to overcome difficulties in English and math. Discover our activities designed to help you support your child as they develop their literacy and numeracy skills!
This nine-activity sequence explores different aspects of writing by focusing on spelling tips and the fundamentals of building a good sentence. Using games that are based on sounds, syllables, and meaning, your child will become a more confident writer, no memorizing required!
They’re designed to fit easily into your family routine and to be done in order. They were created specifically to help children with learning difficulties, but all children can benefit from them!
You will need:
This first activity demonstrates different ways to learn how to spell words while having fun. Your child will be asked to reflect on words (sounds, syllables, and meanings) to understand spelling rules.
The second activity supports your child’s first steps into the reading world with the phonemic blending strategy. Your child will learn to listen to sounds and blend them together into words.
The third activity supports your child in their first steps to writing words, through spelling by sound. Your child will learn to segment words into individual sounds, making it easier for them to write words.
The fourth activity focuses on recognizing closed vowel sounds through closed syllables. Your child will practise reading by syllable type and learn that in closed syllables, the short vowel sounds are used.
The fifth activity introduces the Magic E Rule for reading and spelling. Your child will learn that an E at the end of a word may be silent, but it makes the vowel say its name! This strategy will help deciding short vowel sounds and long vowel sounds when reading and writing.
Why are some sentences considered incomplete? This 6th activity, which marks the beginning of the syntax section, will help your child understand the composition of a well-constructed sentence. Through easy-to-understand examples, they’ll learn to check whether their idea is complete, makes sense, and follows the basic rules of a complete sentence.
Activity 7 focuses on punctuation—the marks that add rhythm and pace to a text or sentence and structure to ideas. It demonstrates how capital letters, periods, and commas help to organize ideas and avoid confusion.
This activity demonstrates how to check if a sentence you’ve written makes sense, so that the intended message is clear and easy to understand. Does my sentence have too many words? Are the words in the right order? These are just a few of the important questions to ask yourself as you learn to build sentences.
Well done! You’ve made it to the final activity! This time, your child will practise identifying words that make up the essential elements in a sentence. By learning to systematically answer questions like Who or what are they talking about? and What are they saying?, they’ll improve their ability to spot missing elements and avoid incomplete sentences. Eventually, your child will instinctively learn to recognize the necessary parts of a sentence.
This sequence is part of a collection of tools and resources to help your child develop literacy and numeracy skills.
Check out our Learning Together collection to discover more activities to support your child as they learn to read, write, and do math.
Check out our other resources to help your child learn spelling and sentence structure.
These activities were created by learning specialist Marie-Lou Laplante for Institut TA.