Perfect Peg Bats

If you visit Room 4 you may need to look out for our hanging peg bats. 

Some of our bats are hanging upside down and some are flying. (We discovered that bats hang upside down because they need to fall down to start flying.)

Believe it or not these bats are part of our phonics programme.

Now that we are masters of saying the sound that each letter makes (and some digraphs too). We have been learning how to segment and blend CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words this week. Blending and segmenting simple words is going to be a major focus of our phonics programme for the rest of this term.

Segmenting words involves saying each phoneme (sound) separately. The children are learning to break down a word into each of its individual sounds. We 'robot' each word to hear the phonemes that make up that word. When I teach 'roboting' with the children we move our arms up and down like a robot, one arm movement for each separate sound. 

Blending is about pulling all the sounds together again. When we robot words the last movement is moving one arm across our bodies to sweep the sounds together and saying the whole word at the same time. Bat becomes "/b/-/a/-/t/ - bat."

I have also been teaching the children to imagine that each word is a piece of stretchy chewing gum. We put the word in our mouths and stretch it out with our hand. At the start of the word your hand is near your mouth and as you say the word slowly your hand moves further away from your mouth. By the last stretched out sound your arm has reached right out away from your mouth. Bat becomes "/b/..../a/...../t/.....

This week we were looking at /a/ as the medial (middle) phoneme, next week we will practise /o/ as in 'dog'.

  

Because these bats are so cute (and I love peg animals) I have made these bats with my classes a couple of times now. Click here and here to have a look at our bats from previous years.

Because we were making bats we wanted to find out some facts about bats. So we watched some amazing bat videos on You Tube. Here are a couple of them:

We wrote these bat facts:

Did you know?

'Bats eat the moths.'

'Bats sleep upside down.'

'Bats have wings and long fingers.'

'Bats use echo to bounce squeaks.'

'Bats eat insects. Bats drink water.'

'Bats feed their babies milk.'

'Bats can climb on trees.'

'Bats echo to find moths. Then they eat them.'