Here’s another fun game from Letter-join to encourage children to practise their handwriting at home. Great for home learning and to reinforce classroom handwriting lessons.

LetterLotto is ideal for children to use at home on iPads and tablets for independent learning. Children can practise letter recognition and orientation of cursive letters and hear the sound of the letters whilst having fun matching them with the letters on their Lotto card. The letters are then displayed on a moving screen with a cheer of encouragement!

As with all Letter-join activities, a school’s preferred letterforms for f, k, w, x and z will be used, and the font (lead-in or no lead-in) will be as chosen by class teachers.

Click the button and display a random letter. Is it on your card? Trace it neatly and it will be marked off your card. Complete the card to be rewarded with a cheer.

Here’s how to play:

• Under the Fun tab, select ‘LetterLotto’.

• Choose a level to play from Easy, Harder or All.

• Click for a letter on the icon displayed and listen to its sound.

• If the letter is not on the Lotto card, click on the ‘cross’ icon to display the next letter.

• If the letter is on the Lotto card click on the ‘tick’ icon.

• Trace over the letter neatly and it will appear on the Lotto card.

• Repeat this until all the letters on the Lotto card have been matched.

Teachers can set learning tasks for pupils to access at home

(for school subscriptions only)

Teachers can now create tasks for their learners to complete at home by following these simple steps:

• Log into a classroom account and select the button, ‘Create a Home Learning task’.

• Fill in the template, and select ‘Preview’ to see what your task will look like, and edit if necessary.

• Click Save when you’re happy with how your task appears.Enter a search term to help your children find the resource i.e. spelling, or be more precise i.e. long e. You can check this out by searching for it yourself.

• Return to the Home Learning Task page to change the search term if necessary.

Children logging in at home can now select their class, and choose the ‘Home Learning Tasks’ tab. Your Home Learning Task will be displayed and children can search for the resource.

Get ready to practise handwriting at home
Letter-join school subscriptions include lots of great handwriting activities for pupils to enjoy at home, using the same letterforms which have been selected by your school.

NEW! ‘How to’ videos
Watch Letter-join’s new videos to help ensure that teachers, pupils and parents are set up for home learning with Letter-join.

Video instructions for class teachers >

Video instructions for parents >

Class names
When children log in from home, they can select their class name from the list. If your class name has not already been changed you can do it by selecting: Info > Account Information 

Here are some suggestions of tasks to set for home learning:

Early Years

• Watch and practise: Patterns, Easy letters, Easy words
• Magic Patterns
• Write it Right! (Easy)
• Phonics phase 1 – click on the picture and make the noises
• Phonics phase 2 – listen to the sounds and trace the phonemes
• PhonicsMatch (Phase 2)

• Watch and practise: Easy words, Harder letters, Harder words
• Watch and practise ’More letters’: Capitals, Printed letters, Numbers, Symbols
• Magic Words
• Write it Right! (Medium or Hard)
• Class Word Banks for:
  - high frequency words
  - spellings
  - seasonal vocabulary, etc.
• Word search (Easy or Medium)
• Phonics Phase 3, 4 or 5 – listen to the sounds and trace the phonemes and graphemes
• PhonicsMatch (Phase 3, 4 or 5)

Key Stage 2

• PhonicsMatch (revisit Phase 5)
• Word search (Hard or Harder)

• topic words
• French/Spanish vocabulary
• spellings, etc.

Go to Key Stage 2 Printouts and try:

1. Note-taking – read the example and practise making notes
2. Nice and Neat – practise copying longer passages in neat handwriting
3. Word of the Week – use the template to explore a new and unfamiliar word
4. History – research a topic and using the template, label a picture and write about it
   
   

Set class tasks

Find out how to set learning tasks for your pupils to access at home.
Follow this link >

Letter-join’s phonics section has been updated and the addition of phase 5 completes this handy resource from Letter-join, offering further activities to support the teaching of phonics using cursive handwriting.

In phase 5, graphemes that have the same sound but different spellings are presented, for example, the long ‘a’ sound: a, ai, ay, ei, ea, a-e. Children can also see how to write split digraphs in words such as the ‘a-e’ in ‘cake’. They can then trace each grapheme on their tablets.

Phase 5 phonics also introduces alternative pronunciations for graphemes, for example, the different sounds made by the grapheme ‘ou’ as in ‘house’, ‘four’, ‘group’ and ‘country’.

The completion of Letter-join Phonics enables the teaching of all the phonics phases using the Letter-join font, building a joined-up approach to teaching cursive handwriting. It also includes PhonicsMatch, a fun matching pairs game where children can test their memory powers against the clock!