Teaching Children All about Consonants (Reading Book 2) introduces students to the 21 consonant letters and the sounds they make; helps them to distinguish between the sounds of hard and soft c (e.g., cat, city) and hard and soft g (e.g., go, giant); teaches them the consonant blends (e.g., the cl in clean, pr in pretty, st in stop, and tw in twins); the consonant digraphs (e.g., the ch in chick, sh in shop, th in these or thing, and ng in long); and the syllabic consonants (l as in little, m as in blossom, n as in seven, and r as in littler). Special pages are also provided to familiarize students with rhyming words (including those that form word families) and to help them learn about syllabication and the proper way to divide a word. Please note that Habakkuk Educational Materials also offers a similar book to teach students about vowels titled Teaching Children All about Vowels (Reading Book 1).
Most topics are introduced with one or more colorful pages having examples of the consonant sounds and any definitions or rules that apply to them. The colorful introduction pages are followed by reproducible worksheets that serve to reinforce the rules from the introduction pages. Some of the worksheets were designed to be used by the teacher for direct instruction purposes on the classroom screen, while others can be used for individual practice and to assess student learning. If you are using a worksheet for direct instruction, you might position it under a Smart Document Camera or a similar device and complete it with a colored pen. (Check the footnote of the page to see if it is reproducible. The practice test mentioned below may also be reproduced for non-commercial, classroom use, and answer keys are provided at the back.)
Many pages in this book take only a few minutes of instruction time, and it is recommended that you introduce one new page to the students daily and that you spend at least one day a week briefly reviewing pages you have already studied. This will help students to retain the information and will also help to prepare them for the corresponding unit test designed specifically for this book.
A practice test is included towards the end of the book. The same practice test is also available online as a computer-based test. You can access the test free of charge by visiting the website of Habakkuk Educational Materials. (See page 5 for more information.) Students can take the practice test as many times as they like and might originally be allowed to use their books to guide them through it. The computer will notify them if an answer is correct or incorrect, and their grades will be displayed after completing a test. When the student feels confident or at the teacher's discretion, there is also a computer-based unit test they can take to test their comprehension over the book's content.
For more information or to contact Habakkuk Educational Materials, please visit the business website.
