Letter Sounds Book (K.RFS.3a, K.RFS.1d)

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.1d Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

* CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.3a Demonstrate basic knowledge of letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary or most frequent sound for each consonant

I am having great success with using a new approach to phonics and phonemic awareness.  When my kids come in at the beginning of the year their letter and sound knowledge is always all over the map.  I like for all my students to have mastered letter and sound recognition by Halloween.  This allows them to build from a foundation and move on to short vowel word families, manipulating phonemes, blends, and vowel patterns early in the year and get lots of practice at these higher level skills.

Starting with the first day of school every student is given an ABC book that we practice first thing each morning.  The book follows the same format as going through an alphabet chart.  Students repeat the letter, sound it makes, and picture.  However, I find it way more successful for a few reasons.

* It isolates only 5 letters on a page at a time. (After they repeat after me for the 5 letters, I give them a word that would start with one of the 5 letters and they have to pick which letter is making that beginning sound.  This gives them beginning sound isolation right from the start.

* They each have their own copy of the book, every student points to the letter we are on.  The visual being in their own hands and them verbally saying each letter helps to make it more concrete for them.

* When I ask the question about a word and what letter it would start with, they all write the letter on their whiteboard.  This gives them practice writing the letter and gets everyone involved.

This whole activity only takes 5-7 minutes, I chose to put the vowels at the end of the books and all of the consonants first.  Before we practice the vowels I have the kids say: "These are the vowels, every word has one: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y.