PhonicsCraft - Letter I.D Informal Assessment (Minecraft Inspired Literacy)

Welcome to PhonicsCraft!

To effectively and quickly decode words, children need to be able to visually recognize every letter that they might encounter while reading. This is an important foundation skill to establish before working on individual letter-sound identification and word level skills such as phoneme blending and segmenting.

Without solid letter recognition skills, children will first need to focus on identifying which letter and form they are seeing before they can begin to attempt to identify its corresponding sound. Part of this skill involves identifying both forms of each letter they may encounter in a text (e.g., t and T are different ways of representing the same letter).

What's Included?

• Each letter of the English alphabet is presented with a corresponding Minecraft block, mob or resource on the page, and a choice between the correct matching form of that letter and another distinct or similar letter. Your student's job is to quickly match the target letter with its second form from the choice of letters to the right of the target letter.
• Matching scoring form with task administration instructions. This will allow you to record a student's performance as a benchmark of their letter recognition skills, and retest at the end of the term.
• A digital full colour no-print option is included for display on a laptop or iPad, as well as a low colour printable option.
• Online TPT EASEL option for assigning to students and receiving automatic marking. It is still recommended that you follow the instructions in the provided PDF scoring form in order to give the correct directions to your student.

Why Use Minecraft Inspired Resources?

For some students, nothing is more interesting than Minecraft! Children can take the skills they learn from these Minecraft Inspired literacy resources and directly apply them to their favourite hobby where there are natural opportunities to read and write in a meaningful context.

For example:

• They may need to read instructions or follow written clues from a guide on the internet to complete a task
• They may need to write messages to communicate with other players on their server.
• They may need to read signs in the game which tell them where things are.

These possibilities provide a tangible long-term goal and a motivation for older readers who are struggling with foundational literacy skills to persist with this foundational learning so that they can become better Minecraft players. Your student will also be able to demonstrate their detailed knowledge of Minecraft to you, which will provide an opportunity for success and self-esteem building in the activity even if the literacy component is very difficult.

Use of this resource as an informal assessment for establishing baseline letter recognition skills is inspired by the Letter Identification Test (LIDT) created by Macquarie University available for free at http://www.motif.org.au/

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Want more Minecraft inspired resources for reading and literacy?

• For the student just starting out with their literacy skills, we also have Minecraft inspired Letter Name flashcards which are sure to grab their attention!
• If you are working on letter sound recognition with your student, I also have a series of Interactive Flash Cards utilising Minecraft mobs and resources.
• Once your student is working on decoding words, check out PhonicsCraft for an interactive Minecraft-inspired experience based on a phonics framework.

Working on handwriting and letter formation with a Minecraft interested student? Have a look at our Minecraft Inspired Letter Handwriting Tracing Cards and Minecraft Inspired Handwriting & Tracing Mob Fact Sheets to make practise interesting!

Have a Minecraft interested student that is also working on stuttering and fluency? Check out our FluencyCraft Prompt Cards for practising various smooth speech strategies by discussing Minecraft blocks, mobs and animals. Each card has a scaffolded list of potential prompts which increase in length and cognitive load to help ellicit the right ratio of stuttered to smooth speech for your student:

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To the best of our knowledge, this resource complies with Mojang Studio’s Commercial Guidelines on the creation and sale of Minecraft inspired educational resources (available to view at: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/terms#terms-commercial_guidelines). It is not an official Minecraft product, and is not explicitly approved by or associated with Mojang.