Here is a video of a brilliant teacher. She has the kids doing two activities at the same time. Once group is doing running dictation (where sentences are written on cards around the room and kids run from their table to the cards and back, read the sentence, and then speak it to their friend who writes it down) and phonics blending cards (which was the activity for the lower level students). What was great is the kids did this all on their own - once the teacher started the activity, the kids were autonomous.