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Mr. Thorne Does Phonics

Posted by admin | Posted in Create, Evaluate, Interactive Whiteboard, Knowledge (remember), Language Arts, Phonics, Primary Elementary, Spelling, Teacher Resources, video, Websites | Posted on 17-01-2011

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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What it is: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a website and YouTube channel dedicated to teaching kids phonics through videos.  The site has a great tag line, “Where learning to read becomes reading to learn.” The videos are divided up by categories which include:

  • Introduction to Phonics
  • Geraldine the Giraffe Videos
  • Alphabet Letters and Sounds
  • More Alphabet Letters and Sounds
  • Consonant Digraphs
  • Long Vowel Sounds
  • Consonant Blends
  • Alternative Sounds
  • Alternative Spellings
  • 200 High Frequency Words
  • Grammar

Christopher Thorne hosts all of the phonics videos with occasional guest appearances from his friend Geraldine the Giraffe (who has her own book!).  The videos are engaging, help students listen for phoneme segmentation, and give them encouragement to replicate the phoneme sounds themselves.  This library of phonics videos is wonderfully comprehensive!

How to integrate Mr. Thorne Does Phonics into the classroom: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a fantastic introduction to phonics, phonemes, and decoding words. Students can practice word recognition, pronunciation, and phonics rules with fun videos that can be played, paused, and rewound.  The Mr. Thorne Does Phonics site would be a wonderful site to have available for students on classroom computers as a reading center. Students can visit the reading center and pull up the video of the exact phonics skill that they need to practice.  Mr. Thorne Does Phonics would also be a wonderful way to introduce your whole class to a new phonics skill by playing the videos for them using a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard.

If you have access to a built-in webcam or portable video camera, encourage students to create their own Mr. Thorne inspired phonics videos.  These can be shared with other students in the class, parents, and younger grade levels.  The videos also make a great record of progress throughout the school year.

Tips: You can also find Mr. Thorne’s phonics videos on YouTube. Can’t access YouTube at school? Download the videos for offline viewing using a tool like Kick YouTube or Keepvid.

Comments (4)

Tweets that mention iLearn Technology » Blog Archive » Mr. Thorne Does Phonics -- Topsy.com said on 17-01-2011

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ktenkely, Michael Berry, Angela Cristiani and others. Angela Cristiani said: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics http://dlvr.it/DX0dr #Around_The_Web #Education_Technology #education_bloggers #union [...]
Susan Stephenson, the book Chook said on 18-01-2011

Kelly, I love the idea of kids making their own videos like Mr Thorne’s. I’m sure I recognized some Keynote and Pages templates there. It really does show kids how accessible and useful movie making technology can be.
Mr Thorne said on 18-01-2011

Thank you for your great blog post!

Mr T

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admin said on 18-01-2011

Thank you Mr. Thorne for the great resource you are creating!

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