Kindergarten

In Reading Club, we will be developing your child's phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics skills.

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words. The levels of phonological awareness are, from simplest to most complex: syllables, onset–rime, and phonemes. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. We know that a student's skill in phonological awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language — and that there is an organized, logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.

Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows children to apply these relationships to both familiar and unfamiliar words, and to begin to read with fluency.

Children are taught, for example, that the letter n represents the sound /n/, and that it is the first letter in words such as nose, nice and new. When children understand sound–letter correspondence, they are able to sound out and read (decode) new words.

(Definitions provided by Reading Rockets)

Videos

Letter Sounds Practice your letter sounds with Ms. Jernigan.

Watch at Home

Reading Buddies A fun, foundational reading TV series for students PreK-3. The show instructs three important underlying components of skillful word reading: phonological awareness, letter names/sounds, and blending sounds to decode words accurately.

Sounder and Friends Created by literacy experts, Sounder & Friends targets the critical skill of phonemic awareness, a key to reading proficiency. Children will practice blending, segmenting, and manipulating the sounds in words in a fun, playful way.