Kindergarten

Pronouncing the Letter Sounds for Blending 

What does reading support look like in Kindergarten?

The reading team collaborates with the classroom teachers to support small group instruction.  We push in to the classrooms for at least the first half of the year.

Some of the activities we do with students in a small group include:

Visual Drills- We flash the key word cards and students say the name of the letter, the key word, and the sound.  

Auditory Drills- We dictate sounds to students and have them write them in sand or on a white board.

Phonemic Awareness-Classroom teachers work on this daily using the Heggerty program.  In small groups, we reinforce the skills being taught, such as rhyming, isolating the first sound in a word, blending sounds together to make words, and segmenting whole words into individual sounds. 

Phonics/ Blending-As soon as students know 3-5 letters (including at least one vowel), we start blending sounds together to make words.

Dictation- We dictate words and sentences that help students practice the sounds they've learned.

High Frequency Word Practice-We introduce new words regularly, helping students recognize the sounds in a word, which parts follow phonics rules, and which parts of the words we need to learn by heart.

Decodable Text-Students are given words and short books and passages that they can decode based on the phonics skills we're working on each week.

Comprehension- This is always the ultimate goal of reading. In Kindergarten we spend a great deal of time teaching students how words work. They learn the sounds letters make and how to put those sounds together to read and write.  We weave in comprehension instruction through conversation, reading aloud, and discussions.  Comprehension in Kindergarten focuses on oral language and vocabulary development.  Keep reading aloud to your children.  It's so important!