Teaching Sounds, Teaching Letters  (Draft Edition 2023)

The TSTL document is designed to support kindergarten teams to plan and implement bilingual effective instruction in:

• letter names and sounds acquisition;

• development of phonological awareness;

• progression of print development skills.

____________________________________

Dear Educators,

In this revised edition of Teaching Sounds, Teaching Letters, you will find research put into action in service of developing Kindergarten student alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness in a bilingual Kindergarten program. TSTL provides educators with support to implement this branch of literacy learning throughout the school day with instructional routines, small group learning, assessment and playful practice.

This document is designed as a resource rather than a program. While TSTL uses cycles of instruction that have been laid out in a specific order with sample scripts and activities, instruction should always be responsive, driven by assessment and tailored to the needs of your specific learners. As you become familiar with the skills students must acquire to become fluent readers and writers beyond Kindergarten, we encourage you to adapt routines in response to the children you are working with. This might entail repeating whole cycles, or portions of cycles, or moving forward more quickly either with the whole class or small groups.

In all of our literacy work, we must acknowledge the crucial role oral language plays in building foundational literacy skills. Through interactive conversations, storytelling, and group discussions, children acquire vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, enhancing their comprehension and expression skills. These activities promote listening, turn-taking, and critical thinking skills, all of which are fundamental to successful reading and writing. By fostering a rich oral language environment, Kindergarten educators facilitate the development of phonemic awareness, fluency, and vocabulary, enabling children to eventually become proficient readers and effective communicators.

Children do not naturally develop alphabetic principles, phonological awareness and printing skills, therefore these skills need to be taught explicitly. TSTL provides the tools to structure instruction based on a series of scope and sequences in order to target specific skills. In order to support you in knowing what skills to target, the TSTL will take you through the assessment cycle to help you make the most of large group lessons, small group activities, transitions and playful practice to support your students in continuing to develop their skills. 

This resource was put together with the support of many contributors. We would like to thank the OCDSB’s speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, and literacy coaches. Their contributions of information, clarification, and willingness to read and re-read the many drafts was invaluable. We would also like to thank the many educators working in Kindergarten classrooms for their insights and feedback as they put the initial iteration of this document to use. Finally, a huge thank you to educators in our system who were willing to invite us into their classrooms and be filmed to create videos in support of the learning of their educator peers.

We are excited to share this learning journey with educators and Kindergarten students!

The Early Years Team

 A wonderful resource that supports the development of language comprehension skills is Oral Language at Your Fingertips or its French version, Le langage oral à portée de la main, created by Ontario Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists. Copies of this resource should be available in most schools.