Oo-oo Word Wheel

My literacy homework this week was to make a 'Word Wheel' to help Maisie with her spelling, reading and phonics.

If you haven't seen one of these before, the idea is that the top wheel has one phonic sound and the lower wheel has words going around it that use that phonic sound. The top wheel has one or two holes cut out that reveal the changing letters - and therefore words - as the wheel is turned.

Well I spent so long making this, (not to mention that I quite impressed myself!) that I thought I would share it here.

If you fancy making your own, I used Photoshop and here's the very quick explanation -

I chose the 10 petal flower shape, as the petals seemed to lend themselves better to little hands than just a plain circle As there were 10 petals, I rotated the canvas by 36 degrees every time I wanted to place one of my words into the individual petals. I then designed a smaller top flower and typed on the word 'school', to the right of my centre dot, as this was my longest word. I then covered the beginning and last letter with rectangles to be cut out later. I added a 'cuckoo' clipart as my daughter knows that the cuckoo is the Jolly Phonics reminder for the 'oo-oo' or 'u-oo' sounds.

There was a bit of trial and error to ensure that the lower words had been placed in exactly the right place, but it mostly involved rotating the lower wheel by 36 degrees, copying the upper wheel, pasting it over the lower wheel, reducing the opacity of the upper wheel so that both sections could be read at the same time (placing the centre points together) and then nudging the words until they were in exactly the right place.

I made the lower wheel bigger, purely because we'd been shown wheels in class made of 2 circles that were both the same size, and these seemed awkward for an adult to turn, so I imagine they would prove tricky for a 4 year old.

I hope this is useful to somebody - it seems a shame to have spent so long making it, for it to be filed away forever...

Brownie points to those that can spot the 'odd word out'...

Clipart image reproduced by permission of Microsoft.

Here's the link to the lower part

and here's the link to the upper part

----------