Short u Bible Reader

We worked hard this last week on Lesson 5 of our Short u Bible Reader with my FREE Phonics by The Book curriculum!

Lesson 5 recounts the story of Joseph (snippets from Genesis 37-47) with the reader, God Was With Joseph, and focuses on the short u pattern 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.

Short u Bible Reader for Kids

In this post, you’ll find:

my God Was With Joseph reader (with a focus on short u words)
printables & activities for reinforcing short u 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(Note: Don’t stress out and feel like you have to do all of these activities. We certainly don’t. You are more than welcome to pick and choose what you want to use.)

READER: God Was With Joseph

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 lessons 1-4. {See links at the end of the post.}

SHORT U: 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 u word sort: We sorted the short u word families: -uck, -ust, & -ump. 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 trust, stump, & pluck).

We scrambled them up and he resorted with support, then we took turns reading the words. Some of these words come from the reader.

Day 2: Play Sort, Say & Score

We played a game I made up (I used a lot when I tutored) called Sort, Say & Score. It’s EXTREMELY simple, yet fun. It’s especially fun for the child because it’s basically set up so the child will win each time. 😉

First, set up your head words from the sort: DUCK, JUMP, & MUST

Players take turns picking a word card, sorting it under the correct column, then reading the word. A player can get a point for sorting it correctly and for reading the word correctly; so on each turn, a player can score 2 points. (Points are kept with tally marks…a great way to integrate some math into the game.)

Here’s the variation that makes it fun and a little more challenging: If Player 1 does not sort the word correctly or say the word correctly, then Player 2 can “catch” the mistake and fix it. When Player 2 does this, he can earn the points that Player 1 should have scored. So, I try to slip a mistake in there every once in a while to make sure the child is paying attention (and to allow him to gain extra points on me). For example, I sorted tuck correctly under DUCK, but I said truck instead. He was quick to find my mistake. I still got a point for sorting tuck correctly, but he got my point for reading it correctly.

Day 3

Little Words Activity with STUMPED. This week’s Little Words features a review of some short e words as well! 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.

Day 4: Word Hunt

We did the Word Hunt a little differently this week, just to keep things fresh. We read through the text and each time he found a short u word (any short u word), he circled it with his dry erase marker. A list of short u words is on page 1 of the reader.

The way I explained it was that we were looking for words with just one vowel, u, in them that makes the short u sound of /uh/. (If a short u word had -ed on the end, I told him to ignore the -ed part because “it’s just a special ending we put on words sometimes”.)

Before starting our word hunt, I also told him he would come across one “oddball” word: a word with only one u, but the u would not make the short u sound. He was so excited to finally find it (put) and he circled it in red to show that it is different.

Day 5: Blind Sort

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 God Was With Joseph Reader and word cards in the Word-Wac-Woe activity.)

I pulled out two new words for him this week: more & about and kept will as a review word, even though it wasn’t in the actual reader. 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.

To integrate his new sight words into our reading, I had him go through and circle about and more each time he saw them in the reader.

Spelling words with magnetic letters-he spelled & read his words for the week as well as review words from weeks past (10 words in all)

Secret Sentence: Unscramble the sight words to find the secret sentence: God was with him. (If you’ll notice in the picture, I have the first letter of the secret sentence circled. This is to cue the child that this should be a capital letter…I need to go back to my older printables and do the same.)

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 Lessons 1-4, you only need to print off pages 10-12 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:

This week, he made a God is With Me book. These are two of my favorite pages from his book (which is 6 pages long):

God is with me when I am at the GROSHRE store. (I love how he spelled grocery store!)

God is with me when my mom is not. (My absolute favorite page–It’s so comforting to know that he knows God is bigger than mama!)

He used construction paper for the front and back and glued a picture of him on the front. He was SO proud of his book! He read the book over and over to anyone who would listen. Too bad it got stapled together before I could include an Autograph page!!

Dictation Sentence: I use this as an assessment to see how well ALuv remembers his writing conventions as well as spelling short u words and sight words. To see a dictation sentence in action, click here. I didn’t get a snapshot of ours this week: Just trust God at all times.

BIBLE VERSE: More ideas are listed in the Lesson 5 Outline, but there is a printable cut and paste activity on the download.

To download all the printables in this lesson, click below: