Inventive Spelling

Inventive or Phonetic spelling is when a child uses the sounds they hear in a word to spell.  This is very difficult for children and requires them to use all of the skills they know including: letter sounds, letter formation, phonemic awareness (hearing the sounds in the word and their location in a word), and remembering their idea while considering all of the above. This is a key developmental stage in your child's writing!  They are expressing their ideas and thoughts while practicing the mechanics of writing. Children who are worried about spelling each word correctly may grow to dislike writing and avoid it or only attempt to write the words we know. Please allow students to write using the sounds they hear in a word and guide them to hear more of them. As students practice they will be able to record more and more sounds with increasing accuracy. 

Below are some ideas if you are looking for ways to practice kindergarten skills at home.

Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills are what your child uses to grasp objects, write, color,  cut, tie their shoes, and eat with silverware.  Fine motor skills involve how your child coordinates what they see with the use of small muscles. Fine motor skills affect things such as writing ease, penmanship, coloring in the lines, fastening buttons, and manipulating small objects. You can practice these skills at home by doing different activities that require hand eye coordination and those small muscles.  Some ideas would be to...

• Use tweezers to pick up small objects like pom poms and put them in a jar

• Color inside the lines

• You can print cutting pages that have zig zags, straight lines, and other patterns for your child to practice cutting on the line-  you can google "cutting practice" to find a ton of options 

• Making jewelry such as stringing beads, stringing pasta, or putting beads on pipe cleaners or straws

• use eye droppers to drop paint and make a picture

• use kitchen tongs to clean up smaller toys like blocks

If you Google fine motor activities you'll find a slew of great ideas! 

Math

Kindergartners can work on their math skills without even realizing it! Some ideas are:

• Counting to 100 in the car by 1's, 5's, and/or 10's

• Count the number of items in your shopping cart

• Count their toys as they clean up

• Put out a number of toys of the same type and ask your child how many there are ex. put out 5 cars and ask how many cars there are 

Letters

Letter identification, formation, and sound knowledge are all key skills in learning to read and write. Below are some ideas if you are looking for ways to practice this at home. 

• have students practice writing letters in shaving cream

• tape letters on the floor with masking or duct tape. Students can do a motion that starts with that letter while they travel along the letter saying the letters name. ex. letter K- student kicks out while walking along the tape saying "k, k, k" 

• use dot markers to make letters

• watch and follow along with Jack Hartman- He teaches students each letter of the alphabet in this playlist click here He has other awesome videos too! Feel free to check those out! 

• If you don't mind making a game kids love to play KABOOM! This can be used for letters as well as sight words!  All you need are thick popsicle sticks and a cup.  Click here for directions.

Reading

If your child is stuck on a word... 

• Have them say each sound in the word

• blend the first two sounds together and then add the rest

• Check did what you say make sense? 

To help your child with comprehension (remembering what they read) ask them some questions after reading a story . This could be done if you read the story or your child? 

• Have your child retell the story- ask what happened first, next, then, ect. 

• Ask them what their favorite part was

• Ask them if they ever felt the same way as one of the characters? Have they ever done something like the characters did? 

• Ask them why charters made choices. ex. Why did Joe look in the closet?  or  Why was Joe mad?