Categories Literacy

Make Teaching Phonics Fun With The Wedding Of Q & U!

We are always looking for fun and easy ways for teaching phonics. As part of our Backwards Bootcamp, we celebrate Q and U’s wedding with a great phonics lesson. During ABC BOOTCAMP, we learned that Q and U are always together. So we have a very simple and fun friendship celebration to help students remember Q and U are always together! This adorable and highly engaging event is a must-do in our classroom. A q and u wedding is a fancy way to celebrate the spelling of the “qu” pattern! We have modified our wedding to remove the Mr./Mrs. component and make it just about the two letters. And this year we even removed the wedding completely and made a friendship celebration. Either way works!

I know that some classrooms do big elaborate fancy weddings for Q and U, and that’s freakin’ awesome. But we keep it simple in our room. We have fun…we giggle…we learn. And yes, our wedding has some academic component, so we’re still meeting standards and teaching phonics!

Teaching Phonics: QU Wedding

We will decorate our celebration with some simple decorations! I printed the letters on cardstock and taped them to the board. We found a fun flower background image and put it on our smartboard!

I drew the Q and U on the posterboard and colored them with markers. They have been laminated for use year after year!

We make Q and U cards. Students choose if they want to be a Q or U.

science of reading lesson plans for teaching phonics

Teaching Phonics: Q and U Friendship

We have a very short ceremony featuring Q and U!

Following the ceremony, we create a chart of Qu words! During this activity we are saying the word, segmenting the sounds, spelling the sounds, writing the word and blending the sounds!

Students then write the words on their thank you notes!

Another great idea for teaching phonics is picture sorting because QU and K are difficult sounds to hear. We do a picture sort to practice hearing the sounds!