Tactile Lessons

According to various theories of education, teachers should plan lessons that appeal to all of the different types of learning. Keeping this in mind, I decided that with our beginners, we would incorporate a little tactile activity into each night class.

Mrs. Linda recently gave me some of her leftover homeschool supplies. Amongst that pile of materials was a stack of cut-out letters that are usually used for bulletin boards. A super successful activity that we used with the beginners (and later with some intermediates) is that of “physically” spelling words.

With the beginners, we spent quite a while on phonetics. To practice, I made a list of words that are not spelled irregularly, we broke into groups, and Hannah and Rachel would call out one word at a time, the teams working together to spell them with the bulletin board letters. The rules were that they would completely spell the word, and then Hannah and Rachel would approve or correct. The students got very into the game and learned a lot about sounds that they must be careful with.

If you don’t have access to such letters, you can definitely make them out of regular paper and markers.