Paint Cards for Blending Sounds, Synonyms? Yes!

Hi there!
By now you know that my husband and I are working on our 125 year-old house. This means I make A LOT of trips to home-improvement stores. I mean, I practically call Lowes “my second home.”

Since I visit these stores say….once per week, I came up a few therapy/small group ideas to use with paint cards. And, the best part? Paint cards are 100% FREE. You may just need to tell them that you are planning on painting A LOT of rooms. Which is not a lie for me 🙂

Idea #1
Use paint cards (the type with 3 shades) to write CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words on. My supervisor when I was student teaching actually did this. Paint cards make it so much more interesting than boring old flashcards AND they provide a GREAT VISUAL for young kiddos. With each shade, they can “sound out” (we call it “tapping out” at my school) each sound and then blend the word together. Since the colors are blended, it makes so much more sense to a student working on “blending sounds.” Here are some of mine:

I’ve also found out that kids are highly motivated by colors. They love to ask “Can I choose my color?” Go for it!

Idea #2
These color cards are GREAT to work on digraphs and blends. They provide the PERFECT VISUAL to teach students that although th, sh, ch, ck, wh have 2 letters, they only make 1 sound. The same applies to blends. We don’t say /s/ /l/ when we sound a word out, we say /sl/. I write the digraph or blend so that both letters are on one color. Here are some that I made:

Idea #3

I also came up with something for my older students using these. A lot of them laughed and said “I know where you got those!” They also enjoyed being able to “pick their own color.”

I work on word relationships a lot with my students (synonyms, antonyms, analogies, etc.) Although I work on synonyms, I wanted to teach my students that words also have “shades of meaning.” These paint cards were PERFECT!

On the light portion of each card, I wrote out a word

happy

scared

fast

nice

good

unhappy

mad

slow

smart

tasty

Then, I explained that words can have different intensities, just like the colors. For example, I’m more than happy if I’m “excited” and I’m more than excited if I am “ecstatic.”

I was sooooo impressed and proud of some of the words my students were able to come up with!

Here are some examples of their work (I interpreted their handwriting below to make it easier to read):

Wow! What AMAZING words my students were able to come up with! I mean, “hypersonic?”, “scrumptious?” I asked where they had heard these words and they said “from someone.” The color cards provided a perfect opportunity to bring them out!

Do you have any other ideas for paint cards? I would LOVE to hear them!

Don’t forget, post a comment by Saturday on my previous blog post for a chance to win a $10 TPT gift card!

Come as you are. Leave encouraged.

I'd love for you to join my newsletter family so that I can start sending weekly encouragement as well as access to an entire library of free resources like this Student Self-Progress Report Sheet!

Comments

Communication Station: Speech Therapy, PLLC says
October 2, 2012 at 3:05 am

I like using your idea and cutting up each letter and mixing and matching to create words sight words, blending words, and rhyming words for phonological awareness skills! Just a thought! I also have taken the Mickey Mouse paint cards (got 2 of each) and created a matching game for PK kiddos as well! Love those Mickey color cards!!!!

- Nicole Allison says
  October 2, 2012 at 11:01 pm
  
  Love the rhyming idea! I could cut the beginning sound and it would make it much more visual for those matching (rhymes) to see! Where do you get your Mickey Mouse paint cards?
  
vivira hayusweet says
February 7, 2013 at 4:50 am

thank you, it’s really help my thesis.
but could you help me to send me some e-books, articles, journals or anything that related to the paint chips.
my thesis is about the use paint chips in teaching descriptive text.
please send to my email jiyuchan17@gmail.com
thank you… ^^