Children's Literacy Activities
It is important for children to develop literacy skills, or they risk further reading problems in the later years of their education and even in adult life. Literacy activities help to improve a child's language skills, but these don't have to be dull tasks for your students to endure. Have your class guess the meaning of a word they have never heard of, or send them on a missing-word scavenger hunt.
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Scanning for Blends
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Photocopy a page from a book and give one copy to each child. Before the lesson begins, mark down the amount of occurrences of a particular consonant blend, for example "st" in "must" or "stain." Instruct the children to find as many "st" blends as possible within a time limit, for example, five minutes. Ask each student how many occurrences of the blend appeared in the text, and then tell them the real answer. Repeat the activity with different blends and different texts.
Definition Game
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Find a difficult word in the dictionary and ask the class if anyone knows what this word means; if nobody does, then the game can start. Each student writes her name and what she thinks the definition of this word is on a piece of paper. Tell the class the real definition, and then read out the children's answers anonymously. The class will have fun listening to the funny, strange and completely wrong definitions, but in the process will learn the meaning of a difficult word.
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Fill in the Blanks
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Write a short story, around 12 sentences, and split it into four parts. Print these out on four separate pieces of paper and stick them in different locations around the classroom. Place them in obvious locations so the children can find them quickly, such as on your desk or on the wall. Print the story out again, but this time do not split it into sections and erase 10 words. Separate the children into pairs and choose four pairs to play the first game. One member of each team, "the runner," goes around the room looking for and memorizing the sections of the story. The other half of the team, "the writer," fills in any blanks using the information provided by the runner. The game ends after five minutes, and the team with the most correctly filled-in missing words wins the game. Now another four teams have a turn.
Story Sequencing
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Take a short children's story and split it up into sections. Randomize the segments so that the story is completely different and makes no sense. Give a copy of the mixed-up story to each child in the class and instruct him to put it back together in the correct order. The child may not know the story, so he will have to try and position the sections into a sequence that is logical.
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