Sound of the Week: Trace the Digraph and Circle the Pictures

Two letters that make one sound take the place of the single letter on this 1st grade sound-of-the-week page. The sheet shown is sh: a card at the top left prints Sh on handwriting lines, two tracing lanes carry Sh and sh as a solid model followed by dashed copies with stroke dots, and below them sit eight picture cards — a hamster, a ghost, a horse, a shovel, a shoe, a radish, a whisk and a starfish. The child circles the four that have the sh sound anywhere in the word: shovel, shoe, radish and starfish. Two handwriting rows at the bottom, headed Sh and sh, are for writing the digraph unaided.

The foils are the point of this page. Every wrong picture contains an s or an h somewhere — hamster, ghost, horse, whisk — without ever containing the sh sound, so a child who circles anything with an s in it is caught, and a child who listens for the single blended sound is not. Hits may carry the sound at the start or the end of the word, which is why radish and starfish sit beside shoe and shovel. The English set runs over sh, ch and th, each on its own sheet.

Print it once single-letter sheets are routine and the class is meeting digraphs; the layout is identical to the letter-of-the-week base, so the child already knows what to do. It carries no letter-name task, only the sound, and pairs with sound boxes pages where a wide box holds the same two letters. The digraph sheets of this family all print on one portrait page.