I have alphabet and phonogram charts that I post on the wall in my classroom. I use a pointer and go through the alphabet and phonogram sounds on a regular basis. The children watch and chant the sounds in unison. During spelling dictation or creative writing, students can look at the cards to locate the pattern they need if they can't remember it. You can see the pictures for the wall charts in the pictures section.
In my current version, a set of alphabet and phonogram cards are mounted on the wall.
- The alphabet cards show each lower case and capital letter along with the related Sound Story picture.
- If a letter can represent more than one sound, a separate card is displayed for each sound, right beside the first card. For example, the letter c can represent the c/cat sound or the c/cent sound, so there are two cards for c.
- Below each consonant, other patterns that can represent the same sound are shown. For example, under the letter r R, students see wr and rh (wr/wren and rh/rhino).
- Below each vowel, a list of common phonogram patterns and key words that represent that sound are shown. The vowels are color-coded.
- Short vowels are not marked, long vowels are marked with a macron (-), and "special" vowels are marked with two dots (an umlaut) to show that the sound is not the regular sound. For example, for the letter a, there are three cards, with the following sounds: a/ant, a/apron, a/all.
- Consonant digraph patterns are shown on trees.
- R-controlled vowel patterns are shown on pictures that demonstrate the sound. For example, ar is shown on a car.
- The soft c sounds are shown on a sun. The soft g sounds are shown on a jet.
- Extra cards are included for the consonant digraph sounds sh, th/th, ch, and ng; these cards have a yellow background. Cards are also provided for the ou/ow, oi/oy, and zh (garage, measure, vision) sounds.
A black and white alphabet set is available if you prefer not to print in color.
An alternate, smaller alphabet set is available, with color-coded vowels.
In the pictures you can also see a different version of the charts that I used earlier in the year. At that time the alphabet cards were separate, going across the front of the room and around the corner, with the vowel sounds shown separately in columns on the side wall.
The short vowel sounds were shown at the top in clouds. The long vowel patterns were sorted horizontally. The top row showed v_e patterns, the next row showed v v patterns with the first vowel long, the next row showed v v patterns with the second vowel long, the next row showed vcc patterns, and the last rows showed other patterns. The rows for the vowel patterns were labeled on the left side. After that, I took down the vowel pattern labels and added Secret Story posters. See the Secret Story website listed in the links section.
I print the alphabet and vowel cards on white legal-sized cardstock. Each vowel sound has an assigned color which is different from the others. Part of the consonant digraph trees are printed on standard sized colored cardstock and cut out. The evergreen trees with ck, ng, nk, and dge and the r-controlled vowel pictures are printed in color on legal sized white cardstock and cut out.
Click below to view or download.
To use any of these charts, please look at the pictures (in the Pictures section on the menu bar) to see how to assemble them. In order to save paper, I've put some sections that are too long to fit on a single sheet at the bottom of other pages that happen to have empty spaces. So, when you print the pages, parts of some pages will need to be cut off and attached to the bottom of a different page.
