Letters & sounds

Learning letters and sounds is one of the most important parts of the kindergarten curriculum. Our daily schedule has a dedicated time for phonics (a half hour each day), as well as writing time, whole-group reading, small-group reading, and literacy workstations. But we also work on learning letter formation, identification, letter-sound-matching, and spelling throughout the day in various ways. Here are a few activities that we've rotated through this month:

Letter formation

I've put out various versions of letter formation practice throughout the year, including using legos and foam shapes.

Letter-sound matching

We also do lots of letter sound matching activities. Each week students receive a new word sort, which usually asks them to match pictures to their first letter sound. I also have lots of matching games for letter-sound sorting.

Early spelling of simple words

Below is a picture of a student matching what are called "CVC words" to their picture. CVC stands for Consonant-Vowel-Consonant, and are usually the first words that students master how to spell. Some CVC words include bug, cat, and fin. They're easy to sound out, since they have a definitive beginning and ending sound, with only one vowel sound in the middle.

Handwriting

At the beginning of the year, we did handwriting as a whole group every day. Now, it's a rotating center that students do once or twice a week. We completed our uppercase books a while ago, and now students are working on their lowercase letter books.