- Alphabet Lower Case – 50 bricks
- Alphabet Upper Case – 40 bricks
- Digraph Set – 20 bricks (10 digraphs)
- Vowel Sounds Set – 20 bricks
- Letter Blends – 22 bricks
- Three Letter Blends – 20 bricks
- Vowel Rhymes – 25 bricks
- Word Families – 25 bricks
We have been using Educational Bricks to support the development of phonics and decoding skills. Decoding is done when the learner deciphers print into speech by matching letter or graphemes (combination of letters) to their sounds (phonemes) in order to identify the patterns that make syllables and words.
I present Educational Bricks to my learners by using a systematic, explicit approach. For example, I use the Lower Case Bricks together with Vowel Rhyme Bricks to present one vowel block at a time to build a few different but simple CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words using the lower case bricks. Once this blending of sounds and making of CVC words has been mastered, I introduce another vowel brick until all the bricks have been introduced (at the learners pace) and my learner can construct a range of words using both the vowel rhyme bricks and the lower case bricks.
Not only do Educational Bricks support the development of phonics and decoding skills, they can also help build phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes (sounds) in spoken and written text. Although phonemic awareness is usually developed through auditory activities some learners will require a visual representation (letters) to support their development of phonemic awareness and Educational Bricks can do just that. Educational Bricks also support the development of Blending. Here is a great post about Blending – the what, why and how.
I have purchased our sets of Educational Bricks from the lovely Kirstie at Starfish Education Center in Kiama, New South Wales. Kirstie runs a tutoring services from her shop and sells great variety of educational resources, products and supplies as well as a wide range of items for special needs. The Starfish Education Center have all their resources available online and this is where you can find the full range of Educational Bricks. You will also find the Maths range of Educational Bricks which include Numbers 1-10, Numbers and Symbols, great for learning addition, subtraction, division and multiply, and the Fraction Families.
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