Beverly Hernandez, over at the homeschooling section of About.com, has a resource that will be helpful to those who want to reinforce the learning of the alphabet, and phonics involving initial letter sounds. Anyone familiar with the popularity of the I Spy books by Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick, will appreciate this activity. It is good for improving visual skills and concentration, as well as phonics.
I Spy the Alphabet is meant to be done in alphabetical order, so if you are following a phonics program that introduces the letters in an order that facilitates easier learning you may want to hold back on using this resource until your student has learned those initial letter-sound pairings.
The way it works is that the child is presented with a single picture for each letter of the alphabet. The picture is a photo of a group of objects, some beginning with that letter & sometimes just the upper case or lower case letter itself. A few completely unrelated things are thrown in, for fun. The child is asked to find objects one at a time, and although the picture is the same for all items beginning with any given letter, only the thing asked for is “clickable” so the child is guaranteed success as long as he moves the mouse around long enough to discover that “hot” zone in the picture.
Unlike some of the more advanced activities of this nature, there isn’t any overlap of the objects. Nothing is hidden or intentionally obscured. I did see one place where, on my screen anyway, the item requested blended a little too well with the background & a child might have had difficulty finding it. In general, though, these are items an early elementary child should be able to find fairly independently.
The only adult assistance involved in using this “game” would be for reading the names of the objects to be found, as the instructions are all written. The activity would be much improved if an audio component were added to it, so younger kids could play the game without help. Also note that kids need to be familiar with the concept of capital and lower case letters, and be able to distinguish between the two. Each sequence will at some point ask for both the capital and lower case letter attached to that image.
After one letter/level is completed, there’s a congratulatory note that appears on the screen with a graphic. The message says the student has “graduated” to the next letter in the alphabet - this is why I say it was intended to be played in alphabetical order. After “z” the message simply says the student has graduated.
This is a good way to incorporate some ICT activities into homeschooling for a younger child. It is also a good reward activity that can be used in conjunction with other phonics activities. Some assistance will be needed from an adult or an older student who can read.
For more advanced fun:
I Spy Mystery ( Canada
| US
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