Setting a Task
If your students are learning remotely or you are using Phonics Hero for home learning, you may want to ‘set tasks’ for the students to complete. Here is an example of how to do this.
We are working on ‘ea’, ‘ee’, ‘y’ and ‘e’ at school and children’s home learning is to practise reading and spelling with these sounds on level 8.
- Review students’ current levels. If a student is on a higher level – move them back. The children may be disappointed that they’ve moved back, so forewarn them that this is happening and explain why. If they are on Part One the heroes will remain in the Hideout, if they are on Part Two the baddies will leave the jail. For students on lower levels, you will need to make the decision of whether you want to jump them ahead or not.
- Set a Schedule to stop children going further than level 8. This is so the pace in Phonics Hero matches the pace of your phonics lessons and so you don’t need to keep moving children back each time you set home learning.
- Download our level images for your order of sounds (Letters and Sounds or Playing with Sounds). Find the level 8 image and upload it to your home learning software, with an instruction along the lines of: “Please spend 15 minutes playing the Know (eyeballs) games from Level 8 of Phonics Hero”. You might like to annotate the image to show exactly which of the 6 skills – Know, Blending, Reading, Tricky Word Reading, Tricky Word Spelling or Sentence Reading – you’d like them to practise, like the example below.
Please note: if you’ve instructed them to do only one skill as home learning, e.g. Know or Read, but set a schedule for the whole of level 8, the children can continue onto the other skills on the level, e.g. Spelling. Schedules can be set by skill, but we don’t recommend doing this too much as it’s disappointing for children to be stopped from playing too often.
