Creative fun way to teach vowel digraphs

Using my last post as a segue, I wanted to share one of the fun things we do in homeschool to learn spelling.

Today we worked on the vowel digraph "ee". We've worked on that before so it was nothing new to my daughter. I found these phonics sheets on the internet at the link below:

www.skillworkshop.org

These phonics worksheets are great. My daughter and I talked about the "ee" sound and how some words have the same sound but are actually spelled "ea". We decided to focus on "ee" phonemes only and tackle "ea" another day.

I actually printed two copies of the sheets. The first copy I gave to my daughter and she filled it out on her own with some guidance from me.

Then today, I used the second set of copies. I cut them into cards and I placed them on the floor randomly. I told my daughter to look through the cards and see if she could find words that rhymed. So, for example, she picked out "week" and "leek". She continued until almost all of the cards were in pairs. (there were some that did not have pairs, we left those aside).

Then, I told her to look at the cards again, because some of them could be grouped together into "families". She found "wheel" and "steel" and put them with "reel" and "eel".

Finally, I got a dry erase board and told her we were going to make up short poems using some of these words. She loved the idea and picked a pair of rhyming words and started to make silly poems.

We had a lot of fun with this lesson. It was relaxing, no pressure, more like a game. My daughter thrives on activities like these. I have found that they are the best learning experiences for her. She really retains what she learns.

I want to give credit to Margaret Adams who posted the vowel cards at www.skillworkshop.org. Follow the above link to go directly to the page with the cards. I have to say that the website is a little confusing to navigate. I didn't get these worksheets by searching their website, but found them instead by doing a Google search which took me directly to this link.

Do you have any creative ways to teach spelling and grammar?