State and Model the Objective
The children will toil to clean a toy and then read and write words spelled with -oi and -oy, such as soil, toil, avoid, choice, toy, joy, boy, and annoy.

Literacy Activities
Toil to clean soiled toys

• Ask the children if they ever played with a toy car in soil (dirt).
• Allow the children to drive a toy car or the picture of a car (found below) in a little bit of real or pretend soil.
• Tell the children that they will have to toil (work hard) or pay someone a coin to clean off the soil.
• Have the children write toil if their choice is to work to clean the car.
• Have the children write coin if their choice is to pay someone else to clean the toy.
• Say, “In the future, avoid getting soil on your toys. It’s annoying to get soil on your toys.”
• Make a list of -oi and -oy words (e.g., coin, soil, toy, avoid, annoy, choice).
• State that -oi and -oy have the same pronunciation but are spelled differently.

More Practice
Identify, blend, and manipulate sounds
With the word-building cards (found below), have the children make words by changing the beginning, middle, or end sounds:

• Change the beginning consonant: toil→ soil; toy→ joy; coin→ join
• Change the ending sounds: coil→ coin; soil→ soy; join→ joy

Read target words in texts 

• Read the Will You Toil for Coins? target text (found below) to the children.
• Engage the children in reading the target text with you.
• Read the text again, fading support.
• Have the children underline words with -oy and -oi in the text.
• Repeat with the Toil to Clean a Toy target text (found below).

Write about the activity using target words and patterns

• Have the children help create a T-chart with one column for the -oi words and one for the -oy words.
• Display a word wall with -oi and -oy words and ask children to use some of the words as they create one or two sentences (e.g., “I enjoy my toy. I will toil for a coin.”).