Short o Bible Reader

This past week, we worked on the story of Abraham called A Promise from God.  The story hits the highlights of Abraham’s life from Genesis 12-21.  The phonics skill is short o with blends and digraphs.

*This is a series I originally posted YEARS ago on This Reading Mama. My goal is to revise it and add more to it. But for now, I’m just moving it to its new home here.

*Click on the green download button towards the BOTTOM of this post to download this lesson.

In this post, you’ll find:

• my A Promise From God reader (with a focus on short o words)
• printables & activities for reinforcing short o words with blends/digraphs
• printables & activities to coincide with sight words (most are from Fry’s first 100 Sight Word & Pre-Primer/Primer lists)
• writing ideas & prompts
• Bible Verse activities
• A lesson outline that gives a plan for spacing out the activities over the week

READER: A Promise from God 

Before reading for the first time, I underlined words in the text to discuss the meaning when I read the text.  On subsequent days, I gave over more and more responsibility to him, like I did with the reader in Lesson 1, Lesson 2, & Lesson 3.

SHORT O: If you like this sort, these are the same kind of sorts you’ll find in Words Their Way & all their supplement books. I highly recommend these!

Day 1:  Just to clarify, we do our word study/sorting portion BEFORE the reader each day.  The only exception would be day 4–the word hunt.

Short o word sort: We sorted the short o word families: -ock, -op, & -ot.  I modeled first, reading each word, looking for the pattern, and he finished the sort. He read all the words after sorting and we discussed the meaning of a few words (like crop. mock, & stock). We scrambled them up and he resorted with support, then we took turns reading the words. Many of these words come from the reader.

Day 2

He resorted with support, then used a highlighter to find the patterns. Then, he read all the words.

Day 3

Little Words Activity with STRONG.  Ahead of time, I cut apart the letters and mix them up so he doesn’t know what all the letters will spell.  He makes little words (word suggestions are on the download), then he tries to figure out what word he can spell when he uses all the letters.

This word is not included on the download, but I thought he would enjoy having his mama telling him to spell snot.  He did!

Day 4

Word hunt with the short o word sort words. (We did this like we did in Lesson 3.)

I pulled out all the head words from the sort.  As we read through the book together, he looked for words within the text that would fit under these patterns (-OCK, -OP & -OT) and wrote them down in column format.

Day 5

To see a blind sort in action, see Lesson 1 under Short a (#5 in that post.)

SIGHT WORDS: (You can find a list of sight words for the lesson on the very first page of the A Promise From God Reader and word cards in the Word-Wac-Woe activity.)

I pulled out three new words for my first grader. I kept could from last week because he was still having difficulty recognizing it. My suggestion is you also pull 2-5 new words out for your own child; but the majority of the words should already be familiar to him.

Secret Sentence: Unscramble the sight words to find the secret sentence: Sarah was a mom!  (I took a pencil and circled the first blank at the very bottom to let him know it needed to be a capital letter s, not lower case.)

Roll & Write a Sentence: Roll 2 dice, add the sum, then use the number code to fill in the sentence. (2 pages in download)

Word-Wac-Woe: (strategy resembles Tic-Tac-Toe)

If you’ve already printed off all the words from Lesson 1, 2, & 3, you only need to print off pages 9-11 of the download for Lesson 4’s words.

Display and read through 15-20 of the sight word cards, jot them down on your game board,

shuffle the cards and place them face-down in a pile. Players take turns reading the sight words and crossing them off their game boards.  We usually play that whoever crosses off their entire game board wins–this makes the game last longer and more words are read.  Further directions are in the download.

WRITING: We didn’t get to any of the writing activities this week with Valentine’s writing/activities and my multiple trips to the doctor to make sure that baby girl #4 was doing okay (which she is).

BIBLE VERSE: More ideas are listed in the Lesson 4 Outline, but there is a printable for the Cut & Paste Bible Verse.

To download the zip file from this lesson, click below:  

Enjoy learning to read with Bible stories!
~Becky

Find all the lessons in this Bible Series so far by clicking on the images below: