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We need to start this post with a mantra, and I want  you to hold on to this mantra as long as needed.  Are you ready?  It might be hard to say, but I promise it is important.

Repeat after me:  I do not have to rush kindergarteners into reading books.

Seriously.  Say it again, and this time I want you to mean it.  I do not have to rush kindergartners into reading books

The goal of kindergarten is not to have children reading leveled texts at the end of the year.  It’s also not about having them memorize a certain number of sight words, but that’s a post for another day.  Teachers should be reading quality texts to students daily, but we are not using small group instruction to have them read leveled texts or strive for a “Level C” or DRA 6 by June.  So what do we do?  Today, I’m going to talk about what my kindergarten groups look like.  Like most of my posts, I will have a list of resources at the bottom, including a free lesson plan template you can use.

 If I have a kindergarten or first grade student who does not yet have letter-sound knowledge, my focus is on getting them to know their letter sounds and building their phonemic awareness.  If a child beyond these grade-levels does not yet have letter-sounds, then they have developed some compensating strategies and poor habits that we will also fix.  But for kindergarten and first grade, that’s it.  That is my entire small-group lesson until they are stronger in those two components.  This comes from the fact that the two best indicators of how well a child will learn to read in their first two years of school is letter-sound knowledge and phonemic awareness. Kilpatrick states, “if you provide kindergartners with (a) direct and explicit phonological awareness training, (b) ample letter-sound instruction, and (c) if you teach the connections between those two, you will substantially reduce the number of students struggling in reading at the end of first, second, and even later grades”(Kilpatrick, 2015, p.12).  They are the essential building blocks and are well worth a small group.

Phonemic Awareness:  Background

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate sounds.  Many children will develop phonemic awareness naturally.  While all students can benefit from explicit phonemic awareness instruction, some children have to have it in order to be successful.  Think of it like this—what skill is required when you are first learning to read a new word?  You have to take all the sounds apart (segmenting), and then put those sounds back together (blending).  As proficient readers, we cannot remember a time when this was necessary for us because these processes happen virtually instantly.  But if a child cannot take apart and put sounds together out loud, how can we possibly expect them to do it in print?

Phonemic awareness includes a variety of tasks.  You can segment, blend, add, delete, and substitute.  Let’s talk about each.

· Segmenting: When you segment sounds, you are taking them apart.  If I said, “shop” and a child responded with /sh/-/o/-/p/, that is segmenting.

·  Blending:  The reverse of segmenting. I say /sh/-/o/-/p/, and the child has to blend, or put those sounds together to say the word. 

·  Adding:  Adding asks a child to put an additional sound somewhere in the word.  If I said, “Say at.  Now say at but put /p/ at the beginning,” they would be expected to say “pat.’ 

·  Deleting:  Deleting is removing a sound.  For example, “Say hitch.  Now say hitch but don’t say /h/.” The child would respond with “itch.”

·  Substitute:  Substituting, the most difficult task, would sound like this:  “Say bark.  Now say bark, but instead of /b/ say /d/.”  The child would respond with “dark.”

Phonemic Awareness: Instruction

Pop fidgets are SO much fun for phoneme manipulation.

So what does this look like for students who don’t know their sounds, so they definitely won’t be able to spell the words yet?  The great news is that they don’t need to spell the words.  We’re working solely in the oral realm for these activities.  Eventually, we will bring these tasks to print, but right now we are laying the foundation.  You can do these activities purely as an oral activity or give children manipulatives to complete the task.  You can use cubes, colored squares, playdoh, dots, colored counters, anything that can be manipulated. The manipulatives are used as a scaffold to give a visual and tactile component to a purely auditory skill.

Decide which task you are going to do—segmenting, blending, substituting, addition, or deleting.  With my kindergartners, we tend to stay at the segmenting and blending level.  Next, decide which words you are going to use.  There are curriculums that can give you lists, but you can also just use your spelling words.  Choose at least 5-7 words for this task. Then, use your manipulatives or just your voices to practice the skill. I tend to practice both segmenting and blending in a single lesson. The phonemic awareness tasks tend to happen quickly, so you are able to do multiple skills in a lesson, if your children can handle it. If not, focus on one skill with many different examples.

Letter Sounds:  Background

When teaching letter sounds, especially to the youngest of students, we have an obligation to do things correctly.  That means we teach them explicitly, we teach the sounds with precision (y is not /yuh/), and we spend the time and effort to make sure students have proper letter formation.  I do not rush when teaching students letter sounds, because I know that you cannot underestimate the importance of this skill.  I get so frustrated when I see teachers allowing students to perform herculean tasks to make a letter, simply because it is how the child is used to it.  In kindergarten and first grade, it is our charge to stop them and show the correct way. After first grade, as long as the handwriting is legible (unless reversals are an issue), I do not focus on letter formation. By then, students have had at least 2 years of writing letters in a certain way, and it would take an enormous amount of effort to change.

Letter Sounds: Instruction

Fundations Salmon/White Cards

 I follow a predictable structure for teaching letter sounds.  It begins by reviewing the sounds that we already know.  In my district, we use Fundations, so I have cards that include the letter and a keyword image.  There are plenty of other options for alphabet cards with keyword images.  For this initial review, we say the letter, the keyword picture associated with the letter, and then the sound.  For example, if we were looking at the letter d, we would say d dog /d/.  We do this for each of the letters that we have learned so far.  By having a keyword image, it helps to solidify the sound in children’s brains. 

Next, we practice writing the letters we know.  I strongly urge you to find lines that are labeled in some way.  You might use the Fundations paper that includes a sky line, plane line, and grass line, or you can find something else.  I find that having paper with the images helps with proper letter formation because I can explain better.  Instead of saying, “start in the middle, go left, then down, the right” for the letter c, I would say “Start at the plane line. Fly backwards on the plane line, fly down to the grass, and then fly forward.”  The visual makes things so much easier for children.  I have my students practice between 5 and 7 letters, out of order.

After we review, we introduce a new letter (aim for 2-3 a week).  When introducing a new letter, it is important to use the correct language for forming them.  Make sure you know what you are going to say BEFORE you try to teach it.  Take it from me, you want to know what your are going to say.  I still remember trying to teach the letter “e” to a group of kindergartners and having NO idea what I was going to say to them.  I start letter introductions with the large card that includes a keyword image.  I introduce the name of the letter, the keyword picture, and the sound the letter makes.  When introducing a letter, and whenever we need it afterwards, we discuss what our mouths do when making the sound.  For example, when we make the /s/ sound, our tongue is raised to the bump behind our teeth.  Draw attention to what your mouth does when you make the sounds.

Interactive Phonics Notebook

When the introduction is over, it’s time to practice.  I follow an “I do, we do, you do” approach.  I will say the name, keyword picture, and sound, then we do it together.  Finally, they do it on their own.  The practice is the most fun.  Just remember, no matter how you practice it to start, you should always take it back to paper and pencil in the end.  Some options for practicing letter sounds includes playdoh, shaving cream, Wikki Stix, or any variety of manipulatives.  I also introduce a kindergarten alphabet notebook.  I like it because it follows the same format as the notebook I use for my older students. There’s just something so satisfying about having an entire notebook as proof of the work you’ve done.

The final step is to practice our letter sounds, without the image scaffold.  I have a second card deck that just has an image of a letter.  We practice saying the letter sounds. daily  This review is critical for daily instruction because d dog /d/ is not the end goal.  The end goal is automatic retrieval of just the sound. 

What’s next?

I have to be honest. I haven’t said a single thing about that “c” that Kilpatrick said, where we teach the connections between letter-sounds and phonemic awareness. I do start incorporating reading and spelling pretty soon into my lessons. That DOES NOT mean we are reading leveled texts, or even reading decodables at this point. I didn’t want to make this a huge part of my post, because I feel that phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge simply don’t get the attention they deserve in small group lessons. Teaching the sound-symbol connection does not need to wait until students know all their letters. Just don’t forget to continue to give phonemic awareness and letter sounds the attention they deserve!

Once my students have several letters under their belt, we practice reading and writing CVC words that include those sounds. If my students know the letters t, b, f, n, m and a, they could make words like man, fan, bat, tab, an, at, fat, ban, etc. You do not need to know the entire alphabet before you begin reading and writing words. You can give students just a few letter tiles and work to build multiple words. But the efficient reading and writing of words can only happen with phonemic awareness proficiency and letter sound knowledge.

A note about “sight words.” I have students who are simply struggling to understand the sounds that letters make under normal circumstances. I do not start teaching heart words until after we have learned our letter sounds. I find it is too confusing to teach my children that a letter makes a certain sound, just to turn around and tell them “well, actually, it doesn’t.” I want my students to have a strong foundation in letter-sounds before I introduce heart words.

Final Thoughts

It’s just two skills—phonemic awareness and letter sounds.  Yet, I can fill an entire 30 minutes with activities to support those two skills because they are just that important.  So, one last time, repeat after me: I do not have to rush kindergarteners into reading books.  Instead, let’s take the time to teach the skills that will be the most beneficial on their journey to becoming proficient readers.

Resources

Free lesson plan template! You will be forced to make a copy so you can’t edit the original.

For phonemic awareness:

  1. A very affordable phonemic awareness curriculum. (I’ve purchased the 1st grade version for myself!)
  2. Heggerty. I mean, you can’t talk about phonemic awareness and not mention Heggerty.
  3. David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success. It includes great background, a phonemic awareness assessment, and 1 minute drills you can use.
  4. Phonemic awareness game. (Shameless plug. It’s mine. But I made it for small groups and I love it!)

For letter-sounds:

  1. Fundations poster. The whole kit is pricy, but the poster alone is very affordable. If you google “fundations paper pdf,” you will find lots of printable options!
  2. Fundations sound cards. These are the ones I use!
  3. Alphabet cards with pictures. A much more affordable option, although you have to print them yourself!
  4. Kindergarten Interactive Notebook. This is the notebook I made that I use with my own students.

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Savannah Campbell

Savannah Campbell

Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.

Savannah Campbell

Savannah Campbell

Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.

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