Are you working hard to implement activities that are aligned with the Science of Reading for Kindergarten in your classroom, but sometimes find it a challenge to still include seasonal or holiday fun? Read on to see my top tips for adding a little springtime fun while still maintaining best practices that align with the Science of Reading for kindergarten.
Early Literacy
As a kindergarten teacher, I planned and implemented a variety of Science of Reading kindergarten activities to practice early literacy skills at the beginning of the school year. As my students mastered them, we moved into more phonological awareness-based activities, but I have found that it is really helpful to revisit these early literacy skills from time to time. Especially if you provide more advanced practice than you did at first.
Here are some ideas to do just that. I often forget about how many of my students came to school without ever really experiencing a book or printed words. For those kids, practice with Science of Reading Kindergarten skills such as print awareness is very important.
It’s impactful for me to remember this quote from the fantastic Reading Sourcebook. ” The performance of children on tests designed to measure concepts about print has been found to predict future reading achievement and to be strongly related to other, more traditional measures of reading readiness and achievement. –Tunmer ET AL.,1988
Print awareness: Reading a spring, St. Patrick’s Day, or other seasonal sentences is a great way to include Science of Reading Kindergarten activities. Ask students to count the number of words in the sentence. To add a little oral language into the mix, ask students to expand on that sentence, or give them a spring word and ask them to come up with a sentence. Then count the words of their sentence.
Choose a springtime book to review concepts about print. Find the cover, and discuss the author and illustrator. Or explore a springtime nonfiction book. Discuss nonfiction text features and practice using and learning from them.
Phonological Awareness
- Practice some beginning Phonological Awareness skills. Create a fun guessing game for students surrounding some springtime words.
- Tell students that you are thinking of a springtime word that rhymes with log (frog) or challenge them to think of as many springtime words that have two syllables as they can. Use any number and make it fun!
Add in some Phonemic Awareness too! Science of Reading kindergarten experts encourage teachers to provide plenty of spiraling practice for all those tricky phonemic awareness skills. Students can count the sounds in a word, segment, or blend a spring word. Change the beginning, middle, or ending phonemes of a word to create a new word.
Phonics and Decoding
Other Science of Reading kindergarten activities for phonics might be for students to guess a secret word by giving them hints that are connected to your sound wall. See if students can guess sounds to spell a word by giving them hints. For instance, you might say I am thinking of a word that begins with an unvoiced continuant. Its second sound is an invoice stop whose best sound buddy is /t/ (or whatever is applicable to how your sound wall is set up).
Choose some springtime words that will work with the phonics skills that your students have been taught as dictation words. It would be even better to write a sentence too! If your students know CVC patterns, I bet they can write something like, “The frog sat on the log. (support the fr blend as needed). Or “The dog did see a big red bud.” Students could also work on their comprehension skills by drawing a picture to match the sentence that they wrote.
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