Unit 3 | Feelings & Emotions | Overview

Core Vocabulary Words: angry, confused, empty, full, game, ink, happy, kind, match(verb), play(verb), sad, shy, tired, umbrella, unhappy, unkind, water, wet, yawn, yummy

Supplemental Words: none in this unit

Emotions Card Game - Step 1

This logical deduction game featuring monkey characters with expressing a range of emotions will allow your students to practice most of the Core Vocabulary Words taught in this unit.

In partner-pairs, players of this game (whether students, teachers, or parents) must take turns using Core Vocabulary Words to deduce which monkey character card is an identical match to the 'secret card' in their activity partner's possession.

There is only one Learning for this activity and therefore only one standard set of instructions.

This sequence of units has been planned based on the assumption that students are relatively new to English, and therefore are still learning the 26 letters of the alphabet used in English. 

As a result, the phonics learning section of the first 13 units focus on teaching 2 letters per unit, which will ensure that your students will have been exposed to all 26 letters by the time they begin Unit 14, which will included more advance phonics learning activities.

Letter Teaching: Use the provided two-sided Letter Teaching Cards to introduce the letters U and W to your students.

The front of each card shows the uppercase and lowercase characters of each letter. The card fronts also have color/shape symbols that communicate whether the letter can appear in words as a beginning consonant, middle consonant, end consonant, or vowel.

The card for U, for example, displays an orange diamond to communicate that the letter is a vowel. Additionally, all vowel Letter Teaching Cards have an orange color scheme (instead of the purple color scheme of the consonant cards) to further emphasize that vowels and consonants are different categories of sounds/letters.

The back of each card shows the sounds that each letter is commonly used to represent. In the case of the letter U, the letter commonly represents three different vowel sounds, and the back of the card communicates this with three different sounds icons and sound symbols.

From left-to-right, the three sounds represented are the u in 'up,' the u in 'put,' and the u in 'cube.'

Use the front side of each card to ask your students to tell you the letter's name and then flip the card over, point at the sound icon, and ask your students to tell you what sound the letter makes.

To read the full instructions, please visit the Letter Teaching Cards page.

Phonics Fish: This unit doesn't have many nouns in the Core Vocabulary Words, and therefore, we have chosen to not include a set of Phonics Fish cards for this unit.

However, you may continue to use the Phonics Fish card sets from the previous two units for phonics practice or wait till the next unit, Unit 4 | Colors to resume using Phonics Fish in your lessons.

Letter Recognition: The provided materials will allow for letter recognition development for the letters U and W. Students will be able to practice matching the lowercase and uppercase versions of each letter to increase their quick recognition skills for each letter and also develop their understanding that the lowercase and uppercase versions of each letter are related to each other.

Fronts of the pieces for the Letter
Recognition cards for the letter 'd'

The Letter Recognition cards are designed both as a teaching tool and for independent student learning/exploration.

After matching the uppercase and lettercase letters that they think go together, students can check their work by flipping the cards over to see if the two separate images on the back (in the example below, the 'dog' and the 'desk') create a correct completed image.

Backs of the pieces for the Letter
Recognition cards for the letter 'd'

Although the letters being taught will be different in each unit, all iterations of the Letter Recognition activity use the same type of materials and follow the same set of instructions.

The example words represented by images on the back of each card-pair for this unit are the following:

U: umbrella, unhappy, unkind, up, 
W: want, washroom, water, wet

For more information, visit the Letter Recognition Matching activity page.

Phonics Teaching (Optional): Two-sided Phonics Teaching Cards are available for teaching the this unit's phonics sounds. 

However, many of the example phonics words displayed on the backs of these cards won't be taught until later units in this learning sequence, so it may be best to focus on the other phonics activities included with this unit and wait till a later unit to begin utilizing these Phonics Teaching Cards.

However, if your students are already familiar with some of the example phonics words provided on the backs of the Phonics Teaching Cards or if you simply want to use the fronts of the cards to test your students' knowledge of English phonics sounds, visit the Phonic Teaching Cards page to access and download the cards you wish to print and use.

Recommended Action Words/Phrases: angry, book, confused, down, good, hand, happy, not-good, loud, question, quiet, sad, scissors, shy, sit-down, stand-up, tired, umbrella, up, yawn