Teaching digraphs can be really exciting, fun and engaging for your students. Once they begin to learn letter names, sounds and begin reading cvc words, introducing digraphs is a great place to go next. If I could, I would spend two to three days on each digraph, but some years I just do not have that amount of time. Normally, two digraphs a week works and my students are still able to master each. Here are some digraph activities I do to help them practice using digraphs so they can take them back into their writing and be fluent when they read. These may help answer the question, “How to teach consonant digraphs?”
Word Work Digraph Activities
Word Sorting Activities
As a teacher, it can be difficult to find engaging activities that help young children develop their literacy skills. Word work activities are an excellent way to give kindergartners the opportunity to explore and learn while having fun. Word sorting activities encourage kindergarteners to identify and categorize words according to certain criteria. With digraphs, students can sort pictures into the correct category. You can also give them a word alone or a word with a picture and have them sort. Three different ways you can sort digraphs. You can use these in small groups, too. I talk more about prepping and planning for small group here.
Word Building Exercises
Students can practice building words with digraphs. You can give them words to rebuild on their own with play dough, letter magnets, letter tiles, printed letters, or any other letter manipulative. These are great digraph activities. Students can also work in centers and work with center-based activities to build words with digraphs. These activities can be done in whole group or in small groups as well. For students that may be struggling with building words independently, I highly suggest pulling these students for quick mini-lessons and then working with them in small groups to help them master this skill. You can find the digraph activity here.
Simple Traceable Digraph Activities
If you know anything about me, you will know I love my Read Write Illustrate sets. These are simple sentences with high frequency words and a skill. I have short vowel cvc word sets and now have a set for digraphs. Once my students are fluently reading cvc words and I’ve introduced digraphs, we work on a few of these together. They already know the routine for it, so it only takes about one to two times to work with the digraph edition and remind them about each of the digraphs. We say a little chant for each digraph that is a little sing-songy. It is meant to help them remember what each digraph is and the sound that is produced for each.
With the Read Write Illustrates, the students read the sentence. Trace the sentence. Write the sentence on their own, once, but I have seen others have their students write it twice. The extra line is there in case students write fairly large or make larges spaces and needs the additional line. Then, they should reread the sentence to come up with an idea for the illustration. The bottom of the page has space to draw a picture. My rule is a character, if it has one in the sentence, setting, and some details. Mainly because those things are on the checklist. Once they are finished with their illustration, they go up to the checklist.
The checklist asks about capitalization, punctuation, spaces between words, and their illustration. The illustration is very important because it is how I check for understanding and comprehension of the sentence. If the sentence says, “The whale is blue.” and I get a picture of two cats that are red I know they had no idea what the sentence said. Then, I can pull those students to work backward to find out what skill they are missing.
See it Write it Digraph Activities
My all-time favorite zero prep idea is my See it Write it review activity. I have a few different ways that students can practice their digraph skill. The first is probably what you have already worked on – identifying which digraph is in a word. A picture is shown. Students usually say the word aloud. Then, they use something to write on. This can easily be a whiteboard and dry erase marker which works really well. They erase with their hand and keep going. When I first started this, we used iPads and the Doodle Buddy app to avoid using markers. It definitely helped with not replacing markers as frequently.
It is created in a few different ways. Students can practice identifying the beginning digraph, fixing the digraph, identifying the ending digraph, or word on secret beginning and ending digraphs. The secret word digraph set shows picture clues to what the letters are in the word. Students will spell it out using the secret code clues and then write out the entire word. Once written, they will have to read the word. The answer slide shows the correct word and students can check their answers.
The fix it digraph set has a word that is misspelled and a picture of the word. For example, a picture of a girl with an arrow pointing to her chin. The given word is whin. Students have to fix the word with the correct digraph to make the word right. These types of activities help students work on words in different ways. You can find more digraph activities here.
No matter how you practice digraphs with your students or what kind of digraph activities you do, the important thing is to get in as much review and practice time as possible. Once you teach something, students have to keep seeing it in text, in centers, in their work, in games and all over to practice and master that skill. It’s so much easier for them to practice when they do not realize they are learning.