5 Activities I Never Leave Out of a Kindergarten Literacy Block
Kindergarten is a golden opportunity to prevent lifelong reading problems for our students. It is also a time where we have children entering our classrooms at opposite ends of the earth in terms of their ability levels. Today I share five activities to never skip during your Kindergarten literacy block that can easily be differentiated to meet the needs of any learner in your class. As a reminder, it’s more important to hit all five of these every day than it is to spend a certain amount of time on each component. If you are struggling to fit everything in, limit the number of examples you use during each activity! Here are the activities, in no order of importance:
Phonemic Awareness
In Kindergarten, phonemic awareness is critical. With programs floating around like Kilpatrick and Heggerty, it can be really confusing trying to figure out what to teach and how to teach it. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I am the first to whisper yell in all caps (YOU DON’T NEED A PROGRAM TO TEACH PHONEMIC AWARENESS). But how?
At the beginning of the year in Kindergarten, students should be assessed on their ability to isolate sounds. This is a highly predictive skill and should be the starting point if students cannot perform that skill.
Teach kids to isolate first, then last, then medial sounds in words:
“What’s the first sound in fish? /f/”
“What’s the last sound in mess? /s/”
“What’s the middle sound in sat? /a/”
To connect this to print, ask students to call out the letter that represents or spells each sound.
“What’s the first sound in fish? /f/”
“Touch the letter on your alphabet chart that spells that sound” (you can also have students write the letter in a sand tray, on paper, a whiteboard, or handwriting lines.)
Alphabet charts can be used to help connect letters to phonemic awareness practice. They can also be used to support letter name and sound learning. They can also be used as a scaffold.
If students can perform this task automatically, teaching students to blend and segment phonemes is the next step. Start with words with two sounds, and sounds that are continuous like /m/ or /s/. Use manipulatives if necessary.
For blending, say, “I’ll give you the sounds of a secret word, and I want you to tell me the word. /m/ /e/. What’s the word?” (student should say, “me”)
For segmenting, say, “I’ll say a word and you tell me the sounds. The word is ‘hi’. What’s the first sound? /h/ What’s the second sound? /i/”.
To connect this to print, repeat the above steps for segmenting, but after asking for the sound, ask students to write the letter in sand or with a marker and whiteboard.. Say, “I’ll say a word and you tell me the sounds. The word is “hi”. Say ‘hi’. What’s the first sound in ‘hi’? (student should say /h/). With your marker, write the letter that spells that sound. As you write, say /h/. What’s the second sound? (‘/i/’). With your marker, write the letter that spells that sound. As you write, say the sound for I (/i).
2. Letter name/sound/form practice
This is a given- alphabet knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of future reading outcomes (Georgiou et al., 2012; NELP, 2008; Piasta et al., 2012; Scarborough 1998). Alphabet knowledge consists of letter names, letter shapes, letter sounds, and letter form. Teaching these daily is essential. Focus on direct instruction for one letter each day. After teaching three consonants and a vowel, have students begin combining the letter sounds they learn to read whole words, which you will focus on during the blending routine below. For example, if during week one, you focus on s, a, t, and m, once you teach the components of each letter, you will spend time having students practice reading words consisting of these letters, like sat, mat, sam, at, etc. To teach alphabet knowledge, use a routine that includes modeling, practice, and independent practice.
Following the same script each time keeps lessons explicit and consistent.
Follow these steps:
Teach the upper and lowercase letter name
Teach the letter sound with a keyword picture that isolates the target sound (avoid keyword pictures like xylophone for X because it does not isolate the target sound. “Box” or “fox” would be better choices”.
Teach the articulatory gestures. “When we say the sound /t/, our lips are parted, our teeth are together, and our tongue is behind our teeth”.
Teach the uppercase formation and have students practice.
Teach the lowercase formation and have students practice.
Have students find the letter in context such as a book or a group of magnetic letters. When they find the letter they should say the letter name and sound.
3. Blending Routine
As mentioned above, students should begin practicing blending with the letter sounds they have learned, as they learn them. To do this, use a practice called successive blending, which has students blending the first two sounds in a CVC word, then adding the final sound to complete and decode the word. This practice helps students keep sounds in order, rather than a more traditional approach of tapping individual sounds and going back to the beginning to sound out the word. Often, students struggle to hold each sound in their working memory when they tap each sound individually.
To model successive blending, follow these steps with the example word “sun”:
Model first- touch and say the first sound in the word. /s/
Touch and say the second sound. /u/
Model and say what the first two sounds sound like blended together. /su/
Model and say the first two sounds blended together with the third and final sound. /sun/
Repeat steps 1-4 and practice a few with the student, then have the student practice a few independently.
Successive blending mats for guided practice.
4. Spelling Routine
In Kindergarten, this will slowly begin to happen as students learn more letter sounds. Once they have a handful of consonant sounds and vowels learned, they can begin spelling. You’ll be surprised at how well your students can do this with guided practice. This requires a lot of scaffolding, but it is incredibly powerful for kids to start early, as it teaches the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle is the notion that letters represent sounds and that when those letter sounds are put together, they represent words in our spoken language.
To do this– say a word to your students, preferably a word that contains a continuous sound as the first letter, as these are the easiest words to segment and spell first.
A word like “sat” is a great example. Say:
“Say ‘sat’”. (student says sat)
“What’s the first sound you hear in sat?” (student says /s/)
“If they aren’t able to tell me the sound, I stretch out the word for them. I say, listen. The word is ‘sssssssssat’. What’s the first sound you hear?” (student should say /s)
“Great! What letter spells the /s/ sound? (S)
Let’s write S while we say the /s/ sound.
Note: don’t get too caught up in perfect letter formation here. Students are still learning, and we want them to feel successful with segmenting sounds. That is the purpose of this activity, so focus on providing corrective feedback for the segmenting and spelling itself, not perfect letter formation.
5. Read Aloud
Don’t. Skip. The Read-Aloud. This is your time to model fluent reading and your understanding of the text you are reading. Read-alouds are an opportunity for you to build oral language and listening comprehension for your students. A simple routine you can use during your read- alouds is called CROWD. CROWD is a set of reading comprehension prompts you can use to build your students language comprehension.
C- Completion = Fill in the blank questions, typically used with rhyming.
R- Recall- Questions about a specific detail in the story. (Can you remember what happened after…)
O- Open-ended- Questions or statements that encourage students to respond to illustrations (tell me about this picture)
W- Wh_ Who/what/where/when/why questions.
D- Distancing- questions that connect the story to real life.
Use these types of questions daily in your read-alouds.
In Kindergarten, we may have multiple read-alouds throughout the day. It is important to start building knowledge right from the beginning of a child’s school career by using texts that connect to science and social studies curricula as much as possible!
At the end of the day, Kindergarten is an opportune time to close reading gaps. We want to ensure we are teaching word recognition and language comprehension every single day to pave the way for positive future reading outcomes. These five activities ensure you are hitting both domains of skilled reading daily. I’d love to know what you would add to this list; leave a comment and let me know!
